Thursday, January 31, 2013

The Rifle on the Wall: A Left Argument for Gun Rights

An essay in seven sections.

The Fundamental Political
Principle

"That rifle on the wall of the
labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our
job to see that it stays there."-- George Orwell1

Let’s start with this: The citizen’s right to possess
firearms is a fundamental political right. The political principle at stake is
quite simple: to deny the state the monopoly of armed force. This should perhaps be stated in the obverse:
to empower the citizenry, to distribute the power of armed force among the
citizenry as a whole. The history of arguments and struggles over this
principle, throughout the world, is long and clear. Instituted in the context
of a revolutionary struggle based on the most democratic concepts of its day,
the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution is perhaps the clearest
legal/constitutional expression of this principle, and as such, I think, is one
of the most radical statutes in the world.

The question of gun rights is a political question, in the
broad sense that it touches on the distribution of power in a polity. Thus, although it incorporates all these
perfectly legitimate “sub-political” activities, it is not fundamentally about
hunting, or collecting, or target practice; it is about empowering the citizen
relative to the state. Denying the
importance of, or even refusing to understand, this fundamental point of the Second
Amendment right, and sneering at people who do, symptomizes a politics of
paternalist statism – not (actually the opposite of) a politics of
revolutionary liberation.

I’ll pause right here.
For me, and for most supporters of gun rights, however inartfully they
may put it, this is the core issue. To
have an honest discussion of what’s at stake when we talk about “gun rights,” “gun
control,” etc., everyone has to know, and acknowledge, his/her position on this
fundamental political principle. Do you
hold that the right to possess firearms is a fundamental political right?

If you do, then you are ascribing it a strong positive
value, you will be predisposed to favor its extension to all citizens, you will
consider whatever “regulations” you think are necessary (because some might be)
with the greatest circumspection (because those “regulations” are limitations on a right, and rights,
though never as absolute as we may like, are to be cherished), you will never
seek, overtly or surreptitiously, to eliminate that right entirely – and your
discourse will reflect all of that. If you understand gun ownership as a
political right, then, for you, if there weren’t a second amendment, there
should be.

If, on the
other hand, you do not hold that the right to possess firearms is a fundamental
political right, if you think it is some kind of luxury or peculiarity or
special prerogative, then, of course, you really won’t give a damn about how
restricted that non-right is, or whether it is ignored or eliminated
altogether. If you reject, or don’t
understand, gun ownership as a political right, then you probably think the Second
Amendment should never have been.

It is my perception, based on public evidence, as well as
countless conversations on the subject, that the latter position is that of
most self-identified American liberals.
However they may occasionally, tactically, craft their discourse to
pretend, for an audience that does value the right of citizens to arm
themselves, that they too value that right, most American liberals just do not.
They do not even understand why it should be considered a right at all, in the
sense elaborated above. They would love to restrict it as much as possible, and
they would just as soon be done with the American constitutional guarantee of
that right, the Second Amendment, which they see as some kind of embarrassing
anachronism.

I think we should have this discussion honestly. If the
latter is your position, say it. If you
want to eliminate the Second Amendment right, mount a forthright political
campaign to do so. Do not pussy-foot
around with “I am not against the Second Amendment. I do not want to take your hunting rifles and
your shotguns and your antique muskets,” when you really don’t like the Second
Amendment at all, would love to see it repealed, and wouldn’t mind if everybody
was forced to turn in every weapon that they owned.

‘Cause, guess what: You’re not fooling anybody. When your discourse reeks with intellectual
and moral disdain for gun-rights and gun-rights advocates, when it never
endorses, and indeed at best studiously avoids, the issue of gun ownership as a
fundamental political right, it shows. And
it certainly shows when you say outright that you’d love to confiscate all guns,
no matter how you try to waffle on that later. Despite what’s implied in the
ever-present disdain, gun rights advocates are not, ipso facto, stupid (or violent, or crazy), and certainly not too
stupid to see where you’re heading. So let’s
stop gaslighting gun-rights supporters as paranoid when they state what they
see:

Dianne Feinstein, who
had
a concealed carry permit when she felt a ”sense of helplessness,” saying: “If I could have gotten 51 votes in the
Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of
them…. Mr. and Mrs. American turn ‘em
all in. I would have done it.”

Not to mention Andrew
Cuomo’s more recent: “Confiscation could be an option. Mandatory sale to
the state could be an option.”

Of course, you could counter that nobody should believe a
word of anything these politicians say, anyway. How persuasive is this
performance by pry-it-from-my-cold-dead-hands Joe?

Those who understand gun ownership as a fundamental
political right correctly perceive, and are right to resist, the intended
threat of its incremental elimination in gun-control laws that will have little
to no practical effect, other than to demand more acts of compliance and
submission to the armed authority of the state.
And those who do want to take that right away must be – and they are,
aren’t they? – willing to use the armed force of the state to enforce the rescission
of that right on the fifty million or so Americans who own guns and never have done or will do anything murderous or illegal with them. That’ll institute a
peaceful new society.

Guns, Gun Rights, and
Liberal “Pacifism”

I am not talking about guns but gun rights. This is not
about whether anybody likes or dislikes guns, and certainly nobody should
fetishize them. It is unfortunate that, as with many debates in this country, the
gun-rights debate is cast in the media as a clash between two extremely silly
camps – those who fetishize guns positively, and those who fetishize them
negatively. For there to be a serious political debate, both of these attitudes
really have to be recognized, and dropped, by those who inhabit them. I don’t
own a gun. I’m not defending my gun. I’m defending my right.

I think there should be fewer guns. I think we should have a
more pacific society, one in which violence isn’t as alluring as apple pie, and we don’t
have street parties to celebrate assassinations. I definitely think that the cultural representation of armed violence
as a quick, effective, and attractive solution for all kinds of personal and
social problems, which is ubiquitous in America, is ridiculous and pernicious.
The answer to that is to do a lot of determined political and cultural work,
not to pass a law and call in the armed police, the courts, and the penal
system to enforce it on people who have
done nothing wrong.

Guns are neither magic talismans against tyranny nor
anathematic objects that cause crime and violence. Guns – certainly the
personal firearms that are in question – carry a limited but real measure of
inherent power, and therefore danger, that everyone should respect. (Indeed it
is because they are powerful and
dangerous that they are the nexus of an important political right.) But guns are
not agents of history. They are not, per
se, going to free a polity from oppression or generate unrestrained social violence. Within an insurgent
political movement, they can at certain moments be useful, even crucial, for
the former outcome; and, within a context of social decay brought on by other
factors, they can seriously exacerbate the latter. Their overall positive or
negative effect is only determined by the political and social context in which
they are used, and the character of the agents who use them.

American liberals can all too easily recognize and disparage
the positive fetishism regarding guns, but can be blind to their own negative
fetishism. Underlying this noli me
tangere negative fetishism are confusions and contradictions regarding what
I’ll call the casual “imaginary pacifism” that crops up repeatedly as a
constituent of American liberal ideology. I am not here referring to the kind
of consistent and absolute, usually religious-based, pacifism that we
traditionally associate, rightly or wrongly, with figures like Martin Luther
King, Mohandas Ghandi, and the Amish – the kind of pacifism that would, under
all circumstances, “turn the other cheek” and abjure the use of armed force to
defend one’s self (or anybody else), let alone to advance or defend a political
movement. Such a consistent, rigorous,
pacifism is an honorable position, and those who hold and live it deserve
respect.

They are, however, few and far between, and most American
liberals are not among them. The vast
majority of American liberals – like persons of all other groups – while they
want to live peaceful lives, free of violence, for themselves and everyone else
in the world, support the use of armed force in defense of themselves, their
loved ones, and some political agenda or another. While they actually hold a
position that accepts legitimate uses of armed force, a lot of American
liberals like to imagine that they are living in some kind of sympathetic
identity with their edited, angelic versions of King and Gandhi, and they are
shocked, shocked, and react with utter revulsion, at the discourse of people
who proclaim upfront that they are not.

(They are even more shocked to be confronted with the idea
that maybe King and Gandhi were not exactly the kind of “pacifists” they
imagine them to have been. For King: “Violence exercised merely in
self-defense, all societies, from the most primitive to the most cultured and civilized,
accept as moral and legal. The principle
of self-defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been
condemned, even by Gandhi.”2)

This kind of pretend pacifism is most repugnant when it
issues from the mouth of the commander-in-chief of the world’s most elaborate
killing apparatus, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,“ as King
put it. Nothing is more –“hypocritical” is hardly a sufficient word – than
seeing an American president lecturing political movements throughout the world
on the need for “non-violence,” as if he were some kind of pacifist, using
pseudo-pacifism as a ground for beingunapologetically
self-righteous.

But this kind of presumption is annoying wherever it
saturates liberal discourse – which is kind of everywhere. Take, for example, this
gem:: “As a lifelong pacifist, I support
all protests against the use of torture, and, quite simply, inhumane treatment
of any kind,” followed a few sentences later by: “We should never forget the
brave work of those professionals in the military and intelligence communities
… who fought bravely even as they sometimes
crossed moral lines, .., for the defense of this nation” [emphasis in
original]. Zero Dark Thirty, you see,
is a pacifist document. (Or at least the document of a pacifist.) That a person of obvious
intelligence and cultural sophistication can utter such contradictory nonsense,
without recognizing it as such, is a symptom of how deeply this presumptive
imaginary “pacifism” I am evoking is ingrained in American liberal ideology.

This position seeps down through the “sub-political” issues
of self-defense and personal responsibility. Not-really-pacifist “pacifist”
liberals, I find, often get wrapped up in a recurring ideological process of
shedding and assigning guilt. I
wouldn’t touch a gun. I’ll just call my paid servant the policeman to come and
shoot my assailant for me. My hands stay clean of gunshot residue
and other stains; he wields the
horrid gun and the moral responsibility, and quandary, of using deadly force –
which I’ll endlessly analyze with my colleagues over dinner. And if it really was my ass that was saved,
we’ll all congratulate ourselves for maintaining our “pacifist” guiltlessness,
while romanticizing the guy who did the dirty work for us. Katherine Bigelow
speaks for many, who actually think there is some kind of extra moral virtue in
this way of living in the world. I find
a more cogent description in the Sartrian term “bad faith.”

For myself, since I neither am nor pretend to be a pacifist,
if I were in some mortal danger that called for the self-defensive use of
deadly force, I would rather take on myself the responsibility for using that
force – moral quandary, dirty hands and all – than shift it onto someone from a
quasi-professional caste created to be my absolving wet workers.

If we are going to hold police and other armed
agents of the state responsible for using armed force appropriately – and we
should – then we should be willing to assume the same responsibility for which
we hold them. What we should not do is essentially absolve them
of responsibility because they're doing the dirty work we would
neeeever do ourselves, work from which we have distanced ourselves morally and
intellectually, work that we consider for
us but not ours.

In my vision of a liberated society, first of all, the
number of persons who, functioning like our police and/or armed forces, might
have to spend more time than most prepared for confrontation would be reduced
to a minimum; secondly, they really would be defensive and protective; and,
finally, importantly, they would function, and be felt, as extensions of the
responsibilities that all citizens share and embrace, not as a separate moral
species, specially bred for violence, to be called from their fortified
compound to vacuum up problems and guilt. That our society is not like that is
symptomatized both by how its police and armed forces are organized in relation
to the whole of society, and by how they are segregated in the “pacifist” mind
as both feared and indispensable – moral Morlocks to the moral Eloi of the
liberal elite.

As one trenchant
feminist promoter of gun rights summarized it: “Police forces were
established to augment citizen self-protection,
not to displace the citizens' right
of self-protection” And, I would add, to share,
not displace, citizens’ individual
and collective responsibilities and quandaries in all of that.

Gun Rights and The
Prohibition Impulse

It often seems to me that guns are to liberals what drugs
are to conservatives. Liberals respond to to the real damage that guns do as
factors that exacerbate (but do not cause) destructive behaviors is the same
way conservatives have responded to the real damage that drugs do in
exacerbating destructive behaviors – with the impulse for prohibition, enforced
by the law and its armed agents, the police. Quick, pass a law! Call the cops!
has become a virtually automatic reaction of conservatives and liberals alike,
according to their various tastes; it’s
“the same inability to understand the fundamental nature of the problem at hand
coupled with a perpetual, short-sighted faith in the inherent justness of
well-meaning legislation.” (Mike
King)

The prohibition impulse is as problematic for guns as it is
for drugs (and alcohol), which are ten times more deadly than guns (see chart
below), and at least as damaging to families. Indeed, because they can change
states of mind, drugs can be said to cause,
and not just exacerbate, destructive behaviors. Let’s not forget that the
prohibition impulse for alcohol and drugs was driven by sincere reformist
concern about the widespread damage these substances did, especially to
children of society’s poorest families. The alcohol prohibition movement was
driven by (mainly middle-class) women, and the punishing disparity in crack
cocaine sentencing was originally championed by African-American legislators,
for these reasons.3 Neither worked out so well. Both provide cogent
examples of how the law can be worse than the crime.

(I won’t get into the academic arguments that gun control does
not reduce crime, which come from self-described “member of the American Civil
Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, … Democrats 2000, …Common Cause, [and]
other politically liberal organizations,…lifelong registered Democrat, [and]
contributor to liberal Democratic candidates,” Gary Kleck, as well as
conservative John Lott.4)

Liberals have to recognize that, when you ban guns, you are
not just eliminating a right, you are creating
a criminal offense – in fact a whole set of new crimes. How many months or
years will you have to be confined by the armed guards of the state for having
a rifle with a pistol grip or a 10-round magazine? How many of those fifty million gun owners
are you going to lock up, after raiding their homes? You better have stiff sentences, right? Every
prosecutor running for office will tell you so.

One has to be kind of obtuse not to understand that a War on
Guns, no matter how liberally inspired, will end up like all other such
campaigns. It will create crime and pre-crime, and ”take the level of police statism,
lawlessness and general social pathology up a notch in the same way Prohibition
and the Drug War have done. [It will] expand the volume of organized crime, …
to empower criminal gangs fighting over control over the black market, … lead
to further erosion of Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure,
further militarization of local police via SWAT teams, and further expansion of
the squalid empire of civil forfeiture, perjured jailhouse snitch testimony,
entrapment, planted evidence, and plea deal blackmail.” (Kevin
Carson)

Speaking of the War on Drugs: Is there any greater source of
“gun violence” in America? “Most of the nonsuicide gun deaths in this country happen in
densely populated, lower-income urban environments, [where] gangs and poverty
are the proximate causes of the violence." You know, the Drug War Theater, where “addressing the incentives that
lead young people in our inner cities to gravitate toward crime—incentives like
the ability to gain money and status by trafficking in drugs when few other
opportunities are available—would do more to begin to address the gun violence
endemic in America than any of the well-intentioned but likely ineffectual ‘gun
control’ laws that could be passed.”5 Liberals all know and talk all
the time about the horrors of the War on Drugs. Is there peep one in any of the
gun control proposals from liberal politicians or pundits about ending this
disastrous crusade, arguably the greatest single source of gun violence in
America? Silly me for asking.

Gun
Rights and the American State

What the modern American capitalist state has done is invert the relative valorization of a
standing army vs. an armed people that was held by a long tradition of
radical democrats, and by many, if not most, "Founding Fathers."6
This skews the minds of everyone in society, and is no progressive achievement.

In the current gun rights debate, one does not have to think
too hard to catch the tiny little fact that anti-gun-rights liberals, besides
not really being pacifists, are not
really proposing to eliminate guns at all.
Is there one liberal gun-control proposal being put forward that makes
the teensiest move toward diminishing the use of guns, including military-style
assault weapons, by the police? Is there
one that addresses, in the weensiest way, the continuing, massive
militarization of the police that has been taking place in this country?Is there one that will take away one
gun, one bullet, one armed personnel carrier, one drone, or one dollar from the
bloated internal security apparatus (let’s not even mention the foreign war
machine) of the American nouveau police state? From its corporate
militia comrades?

No. What all liberal gun-control proposals seek to do, and
all they seek to do, is to reduce and eventually eliminate the right of ordinary
citizens to possess firearms. These proposals treat the armed power of the
state with, at best, benign indifference. They ignore, or dismiss as of no
importance, the way these policies will further weaken the power of the citizen
relative to the state. There is a definite ideology underlying all this: That
the state – the American capitalist state we live in – should have a monopoly of armed force; that this state is a benign,
neutral arbiter which will use its armed force in support of and not against
its citizens, to mediate conflicts fairly and promote just outcomes in ways
that the citizens themselves cannot be trusted to do.

All the liberal gun-control proposals do, and I would
suggest the anti-gun-rights position in general must, rest on this premise. For
reasons set forth below, I think it’s wrong-headed, and I do not see how one
can deny that it is elitist and authoritarian.

This ideology is most likely to exude from those whose lived
experience is that the armed power of the state does overwhelmingly act on their behalf, that the police are their friends – people who are
secure in their implicit understanding that they have nothing to fear,
personally or politically, from the armed agents of the state, and that when
they call those agents to help them, they will come and help them, and not beat
them down or shoot them on sight, “by accident.”

At many levels, this ideology promotes the phony notion of
what the American capitalist state is, an ideology that we should be helping to
extirpate from people’s minds, not helping to perpetuate in the name of
ensuring their safety. Under the guise of nonviolent pacifism, this ideology
only occludes the violence of the armed state that underlies all of our lives
in capitalist society. The state we live in is not a neutral class-agnostic
arbiter. It is the instantiation of a relation of forces between classes, which
“uses social crises to reinforce a range of social relationships and control
certain populations.”7 In our case, it exists to guarantee, by armed
force locked and loaded in advance and on call 24-7, the absolute hegemony of
the corporations and the banksters (the ruling class/the 1%/your-euphemism-for-avoiding-marxist-language-here)
over the working people and dispossessed (the 99% and such). We should dispense
with any of the comforting illusions about this. This state of postwar Euro-American
felicity – the liberal, democratic capitalist welfare/social-democratic state –
has reverted to its core class function.

Indeed, we have just seen
that the armed police forces of the state, the FBI and the Department of
Homeland Security, “are treating protests against the corporate and banking
structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity[,] functioning
as a de facto intelligence and enforcement arm of Wall Street and Corporate
America.” At this point, it is blindingly obvious that, as Etienne
Balibar so cogently put it over thirty years ago, the modern capitalist
state, ours included, “isexpressly organized as the State of pre-emptive counter-revolution.”

It might help to understand Balibar’s conclusion in terms of
a rough Kuhnian distinction between “normal” and “revolutionary” politics.8
In the normal political paradigm, which endures over a relatively long period
of stability, everybody plays by the same legal and constitutional rules,
everyone’s rights are respected equally, and disputes are settled in
transparently fair and equal political and legal processes, with minimal and
similarly fair and transparent uses of armed force. In the revolutionary situation, which
predominates in relatively brief and compressed periods of upheaval, the point
is to completely replace one paradigm with another. In this situation, established and insurgent
factions seek each to overcome the other. Each seeks to increase its own
hegemony and powers while reducing the other’s autonomous rights and powers.
Disputes, clearly understood as aspects of the one big conflict over which
social and political paradigm will rule, are settled by the frankly unequal
application of force – whether the force of money, law, political pressure, or
arms.

The curious thing is that we are not in “revolutionary”
politics, since (unfortunately) there is no serious political force threatening
or seeking to overthrow the political paradigm of the capitalist state. But we
are not exactly in a “normal” paradigm either, since the deep instability,
unfairness, and precarity of the capitalist state are just too visible. We are, as Balibar suggests, in pre-emptively counter-revolutionary
politics, where the capitalist state, on behalf of the tiny minority faction (I
call it a class) it empowers, is preparing in advance to repel the fundamental,
paradigm-changing, challenges it anticipates. It is doing this by the increasing, and
increasingly aggressive and obvious, unequal application of money, laws,
political power, and armed force.

In other words, it’s a “revolutionary” political period
without the revolutionary politics. With only
the counter-revolutionary politics. It’s a period where the paradigm is being
radically changed, not by an insurgent, but by the establishment faction. In
the midst of this, too many American liberals are clinging to a nostalgic,
wish-fulfillment dream society where, if they can just, over the next few
election cycles, get the right mix of noblesse-oblige economics and equal-opportunity imperialist
identity-politics, everything will be peachy keen once again. (Isn’t it great to watch Barack and Hillary
order Seal Team Six into action! If only
we can reform the filibuster.) Welcome
to the world of unchallenged counter-revolution.

Well, the first
counter-revolutionary act of every government is to collect the guns, and a
necessary element of pre-emptive
counter-revolution in the American polity is the disarming of the people. Nobody on the left, nobody interested in the
radically democratic transformation of our society, should be interested in
helping with that.

Yet all liberal
gun-control schemes remain blithely indifferent, when not aggressively
dismissive, of these concerns. Somehow, a lot of people have come to imagine
that depreciating versus valuing citizens’ gun rights is a left-right
dichotomy Only in the ridiculous political
discourse of the United States, where Barack Obama is a “marxist" (or any
kind of “leftist” at all), can citizens' right to gun ownership be considered a
purely right-wing demand. The notion that an armed populace should have a
measure of power of resistance to the heavily armed power of the state is, if
anything, a populist principle, and has always been part of the
revolutionary democratic traditions of the left. The notion that disarming the
people in a capitalist state – and one in severe socio-economic crisis, at that
– would be some kind of victory for progressive, democratic forces, something
that might help move us toward an emancipatory transformation of society, derives
from no position on the political left. As
one commentator puts
it: “I can’t imagine why anyone would expect the state’s gun control
policies to display any less of a class character than other areas of policy.
Regardless of the ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ rhetoric used to defend gun
control, you can safely bet it will come down harder on the cottagers than on
the gentry, harder on the workers than on the Pinkertons, and harder on the
Black Panthers than on murdering cops."

There’s no way around it: The net effect of eliminating the
right of citizens to possess firearms will be to increase the power of the
armed capitalist state. It will not be a more pacifistic, but a more
authoritarian society, one in which the whole panoply of armed police we’ve
already come to accept as part of the social landscape will be even more ubiquitous,
while citizens’ compliance and submission will be more thoroughly assured. As Patrick
Higgins puts it: “The formula for gun control seems pretty obvious to me.
Less guns for the people who are most likely to need them, more guns for cops
and soldiers and those sympathetic to them.” If you’re good with that, then go
for it. I am not.

As Higgins implies, cops and soldiers will not be the only ones left holding guns.
My friends have kids in an elite New York City private school. A few years
back, during seventh-grade bar/bat
mitzvah season – which, in these social circles, is like a months-long Hollywood
after-party for thirteen-year olds – their son was invited to his classmate’s
party. Not the bar mitzvah where the
parents flew a bunch of parents and kids to Paris for their son’s coming of
age. No, the bat mitzvah held in
Rockefeller Center. Ceremony in the Rainbow Room. Party in the skating rink. Closed to the public. On a Saturday night.
When my friend went to pick his son up to bring him home, he was stopped at the
perimeter of the promenade, just inside the ring of limos, by armed guards with
those really fully automatic weapons, who would not let him in because he
didn’t have an invitation. He had to
wait outside for his son to come out.
Thank goodness for cell phones, which, of course, every thirteen-year-old
has.

Here’s the thing, and everybody
knows it: Whatever strictest
possible gun-control regime is instituted by favored liberal politicians, the
family who threw that party will still have all the guns that it wants at its
disposal. Donald Trump will still have
his carry permit. Goldman Sachs will have all the weapons it wants for its
private army, which will still be working as an allied brigade of the
supposedly public branch of the ruling class’s armed forces, and which its PR
people will make sure is never crudely referred to as a “militia.” And don’t worry, Joe, no one will be taking your Beretta. Forty-nine million
nine-hundred thousand ninety-nine hundred or so Americans who have never done a
wrong thing will be disarmed by force, but every one of this class will have
all the guns s/he wants at his or her disposal. There will be a system of
waivers, fees and private security armies for anyone in the .01%. Keeping in
mind the incredible growing socio-economic inequality in this country – which,
of course, the push for strict gun control has nothing to do with – the
American social landscape is going to be populated with more, not fewer,
gun-toting characters like these, who will have less, not more, accountability,
and among whom there are no imaginary Gandhis:

It’s too bad that we Americans, with liberals much too
complicit in this, have accepted – along with the growth of obscene social inequality
– the incremental loss of many of our fundamental rights – from privacy
(warrantless surveillance) to the right of judicial due process before being
summarily executed by our elected king. If some fifty million or so gun owners
want to stand up militantly for one fundamental right at this point, good for
them. If, in the ridiculous American political context, a lot of them
self-identify as right-wing, well, bad on them, and let’s by all means tell
them they should be standing up for a lot of other rights, including their own
right to a decent socio-economic life.

At the same time, folks
on the left should be ashamed if gun owners become the first to stand up
militantly against the pre-emptively counter-revolutionary assault on our
rights. Maybe self-identified
liberals should do more than trash those folk for defending a right they think
is important; maybe liberals should consider how they have continually
undermined the building of a populist left, by steering discontent into
conventional political support for their favored Lord High Executioners, and
teaching – by example, exhortation, and outright collaboration – servility and
compliance in the face of right after right, and social benefit after social
benefit, being stolen by those same elected autocrats. The problem with militant right-wing populism
is not that it’s militant or populist.
And a large part of the reason there is not the militant left-wing
populism there should be is that most liberals are neither left, nor militant, nor
populist.

The
concentration of wealth, and the concentration of armed power, in the hands of a
few, are both bad ideas. And the one has
everything to do with the other.*

I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the urbane liberal
revulsion to guns has to do with the picture in the urbane liberal’s mind of
who has them – you know, the wrong sort of people, right-wing “wingnuts,” whose
brains are addled by moonshine and Fox News. There is no question that a lot of
people with ridiculous right-wing political and economic ideas are among the
loudest defenders and proudest exercisers of the right to bear arms. But, you
know, there’s this other empowering, infinitely more dangerous right, one that more
than fifty million people use to authorize the truly nutty killing of hundreds
of thousands of people, and a whole host of truly nutty actions that endanger
us all. That’s the right to vote. I am horrified about how the great majority
of voters – conservative and liberal, wingnut and Serious – use that right to
authorize massively homicidal and criminal policies. Still, my understanding of
the emancipatory democratic political tradition precludes any thought that, in
the course of normal politics, depriving any of them – even those whose brains
are addled by Jamba Juice and MSNBC – of that right would be an appropriate way
for me to try to change the policies I abhor.

Rights empower. Power is dangerous. The right to vote is as
dangerous a power as any. Those who have been deprived of it grasp it eagerly
when they get it because for so long it’s been on display but out of reach,
just like the master’s shiny new gun. Once everyone gets their hands on those
rights/powers, they may use them – or, gee, think about them – in all kinds of
ways I would find objectionable and damaging. They also will find out that those rights/powers are not in themselves
effective of their liberation. The task is not to deprive people of fundamental
rights, but to persuade them to think about and use them in different and more
effective ways. And one has to know
that’s possible. It’s happened before, and will again.

Recent Objections and
the Contentious History of Gun Rights in America

Recently, some progressives9 have argued that, all
the rhetoric about arming the people to resist tyranny notwithstanding, the
real intent of the authors of the Second Amendment was to preserve slavery, and
that, therefore, those who cite the Second Amendment as supporting every
citizen’s right to bear arms today are – well, ignorant wingnut enablers of slaveholding
racism, I guess.

The logic escapes me here. Sure, the Second Amendment was ratified
in a context where most of the framers -- certainly those of the Southern
plantocracy – assumed that the right it guaranteed was – like every other right instituted by the Constitution at time –
meant to be limited to free white males, who were the only fully-enfranchised
citizens. But, really, Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder, so there’s something
wrong with us using his words to promote equal rights? As do the authors of every law, indeed every
text, the framers wrote something whose significance and effect exceeds what
they could have imagined. The text, the
law, that the framers wrote now stands apart from and beyond their personal
intentions. Perhaps it is because they could not imagine the
extension of a certain right that they wrote a text that does not exclude it.
I’ll take that. We all do.

In this case however, we have clear evidence of subsequent
law that was intended by its framers
to extend the right to bear arms not only beyond, but against, the purposes of
slavery. One might have noticed that,
through a series of excruciating struggles during the course of American
history, including a Civil War, the full enfranchisement of citizenship with
all its attendant rights, including the right to keep and bear arms, was
extended to all the previously excluded groups of American society. It is crystal clear that the intention of the
framers of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments was to guarantee the right
to bear arms to freed slaves. As Adam
Winkler points out: “Whether or not the Founding Fathers thought the Second
Amendment was primarily about state militias, the men behind the Fourteenth
Amendment—America’s most sacred and significant civil-rights law—clearly
believed that the right of individuals to have guns for self-defense was an
essential element of citizenship. As Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has
observed, ‘Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the
Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman.’”

Whatever the intentions of the framers in the eighteenth
century, the right to keep and bear arms is today
treated as a right of all citizens –
for sure, only, as with every other right – because it was fought for as
such. That – the fruit of that fight – is the right we are talking about in
today’s political and historical context.
Far from using the framers’ prejudices to dismiss this particular right,
liberals and progressives should be celebrating this extension of it, as they
do so many other rights that have, by the twenty-first century, been achieved
through legal, political, and, yes, armed struggle, sometimes using
constitutional statutes in ways their authors could never, in their wildest
dreams, have imagined. Like, you know, gay
marriage.

These superficial historical arguments actually confirm that,
historically, in America as elsewhere, guns have been recognized as tools of empowerment, to be distributed
as widely as possible among those considered worthy of empowerment, and to be
denied to those deemed unworthy of empowerment and eligible for
subjugation. Who, in today’s America, do
these liberal commentators think is unworthy of that empowerment?

The argument that tries to wed the Second Amendment to
slavery for all time is particularly misleading, because it has to deny all the
ways in which the right to bear arms was fought for and used by African-Americans,
with great courage, throughout our history, in order to defend and extend their
rights. Winkler
describes the freedmen’s struggle and revanchist racist resistance over
this right after the Civil War, including the role of the Ku Klux Klan as “disarmament
posse”:

[A]t the end of the Civil War, the Union army allowed soldiers of any color to take home their rifles… [M]any blacks knew that white Southerners were not going to go along easily with such a vision [of their freedom]. As one freedman in Louisiana recalled, “I would say to every colored soldier, ‘Bring your gun home.’”

…Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes …One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. …The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.

In response to the Black Codes …General Daniel E. Sickles, the commanding Union officer enforcing Reconstruction in South Carolina, ordered in January 1866 that “the constitutional rights of all loyal and well-disposed inhabitants to bear arms will not be infringed.” When South Carolinians ignored Sickles’s order and others like it, Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of July 1866, which assured ex-slaves the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty … including the constitutional right to bear arms.”

That same year, Congress passed the nation’s first Civil Rights Act, which defined the freedmen as United States citizens and made it a federal offense to deprive them of their rights on the basis of race. Senator James Nye… told his colleagues that the freedmen now had an “equal right to protection, and to keep and bear arms for self-defense.”

Unfortunately, when “the old landed gentry managed to
successfully assert its power against the Reconstruction regime, former slaves
were disarmed by house-to-house patrols, either under the Black Codes or by
such irregular bodies as the Klan,” 10 which enabled the subjugation
of African-Americans in the South to the new nightmare of Jim Crow.

In the cauldron of the Klan’s lynching fever, writing in
1892, Ida B.
Wells learned and taught a valuable lesson (that George Orwell would later
echo):

Of the many inhuman outrages of this present year, the only
case where the proposed lynching did not occur, was where the men armed
themselves … and prevented it. The only times an Afro-American who was
assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.

The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should
ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every
black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to
give.
(Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases)

Ida Wells: another “wingnut.”

Ida and the Klan both understood what the latter’s ideological
confrère later repeated:

The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to
allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who
have allowed the subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall
by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the
underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. -- Adolf
Hitler (in Hitler's
Table Talk 1941-44: His Private Conversations, pp. 425-426.).

Regarding the Civil Rights struggle of the 20th
century, and without diminishing for a second the powerful non-violent struggle
led by MLK, we should be aware of the ways in which that history has been
edited to create “pacifist” saints who are safe for the Imperial hagiography,
while rendering invisible the ways in which the renewal of armed resistance by
African-Americans in the South after WWII helped to galvanize the final
offensive against Jim Crow:

The same was true of the Civil Rights struggle a century
later, after World War II. In areas where armed self-defense efforts by civil
rights activists were widespread, they significantly improved the balance of
power against the Klan and other racist vigilante movements. Numerous armed
self-defense groups — e.g. the Deacons for Defense and Justice, whose members
used rifles and shotguns to repel attacks by white vigilantes in Louisiana in
the 1960s — helped equalize the correlation of forces between civil rights
activists and racists in many small towns throughout the south.

Especially notable was Robert Williams, who in 1957
organized an armed defense of the Monroe, NC NAACP chapter president’s home
against a Klan raid and sent the vigilantes fleeing for their lives. Williams’s
book Negroes With Guns later inspired
Huey Newton, a founder of the Black Panthers Party. (Carson, and, on Robert Williams, see my related post Sealed With A Kiss: Mabel and Kathleen Talk Armed Self-Defense)

Indeed, as Higgins
points out: “The modern day gun rights movement was not pioneered by the NRA … but
by the Black Panthers, whose co-founder, Huey Newton, found genuine protective
value in the Second Amendment.” And the
modern gun-control movement began as a response to this by conservative
Republicans, who were scared witless when Newton and the Panthers showed up on
the California State Capitol steps ostentatiously carrying their perfectly
legal firearms: “Republicans in
California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told
reporters that afternoon that he saw ‘no reason why on the street today a
citizen should be carrying loaded weapons’.” (Winkler)

The riots of 1967, which included armed resistance, also brought
new gun control initiatives by the American elite:

The fear inspired by black people with guns also led the
United States Congress to consider new gun restrictions, after the summer of
1967 brought what the historian Harvard Sitkoff called the “most intense and
destructive wave of racial violence the nation had ever witnessed.” Devastating
riots engulfed Detroit and Newark. Police and National Guardsmen who tried to
help restore order were greeted with sniper fire.

A 1968 federal report blamed the unrest at least partly on
the easy availability of guns. Because rioters used guns to keep law
enforcement at bay, the report’s authors asserted that a recent spike in
firearms sales and permit applications was “directly related to the actuality
and prospect of civil disorders.” They drew “the firm conclusion that effective
firearms controls are an essential contribution to domestic peace and
tranquility.” (Winkler)

The non-violent civil disobedience strategy of the MLK wing
of the Civil Rights movement, based on ostentatiously unarmed submission to
arrest and detention by the armed agents of the state, was enormously effective,
but it was not the only thing that had a profound effect in concentrating the
minds of the white American elite on the urgent need to change things
substantively and quickly. I mean real
fast. Anyone who does not know that Martin’s voice was in constant tension
with the growing influence of those like Malcolm and Huey, that a lot of black
people and their white supporters had had quite enough of submission to the armed
police of the racist state, and that the fear of armed black insurrections was
on the minds and in the political equations of the ruling class and its armed
agents, is enmeshed in a pacifistic dream history.

Gun Rights and the Dynamics
of Radical or Revolutionary Contestation

"Power
concedesnothing
without a demand. It never did and it never will," Frederick
Douglass said, and true that. And
there’s no demand without, somewhere behind it, an “or else.”

Do not get me wrong: Militant unarmed non-violent resistance
is a very powerful political tactic. I would say that it’s the most effective mode
of protest, resistance, and contestation for building crucial popular support
against modern state oppression, and it is certainly the preferred mode of
contestation for progressives, no matter how radical their goals, in the United
States today.

Yet today is not forever, and while there is no power more
crucial for radical change than a unified mass movement that represents the
majority of people, it is also true that there are powers, privileges,
prerogatives, supremacies, and wealth that will not be conceded by the group or
class that holds them to any movement of any size or moral quality, except
under threat of deadly force. To rephrase Douglass: Armed power, arrayed in
defense of national, ethnic, racial, and/or class supremacy, will not concede
to moral suasion alone. It never has and it never will.

Every successful mass movement for radical or revolutionary
change will reach that point where it has to decide if it has had enough of
beatings, arrests, detentions, and killings by the armed forces of
the regime it is challenging. It will
have to decide whether to finally submit, or to advance decisively, with new
forms of resistance.

No one has put this more eloquently in recent years that did
the leaders of the 2011 Egyptian revolt, in their solidarity
message to Occupy Wall Street:

It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is
even less our desire to lose. If we do not resist, actively, when they come to
take what we have won back, then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the
tactics that we used when we shouted “peaceful” with fetishizing nonviolence;
if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they
sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option
than to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested,
tortured, and martyred to “make a point”, we would be no less bloodied, beaten
and dead. Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied, that you are
building, because, after everything else has been taken from us, these
reclaimed spaces are so very precious.

Let’s dispense with the straw men. Do you really think you’re going to defeat the US Army with your puny
little rifles? No, and not just
because I have understood all along that any “military-style” civilian rifle is
no match for an actual military weapon. No, I understand that the idea that
every gun owner showing up on Pennsylvania Avenue tomorrow could possibly
result in serious, systemic political and socio-economic change is ridiculous –
maybe even as ridiculous as the idea that voting for the next Democratic presidential
candidate could do so. I understand that, for there to be any prospect of the
change of the sort I would like, there is no shortcut around building a
political movement. I am talking about political principles that are
fundamental to a movement in the long run, not magic solutions in the short
run.

I also understand that, in the US or any modern state, any
plausible regime of gun rights will leave the state with a supremacy of armed force, even if not a monopoly. Still, the state’s lack of a monopoly on that does not
count for nothing. In the process of building a mass movement that undermines
the authority and legitimacy of the state, and the morale of its armed agents,
there will be many discrete moments of confrontation, presumably getting
progressively more militant and threatening to the status quo. A modicum of
armed power among the citizenry may not exactly equalize, but can noticeably
recalibrate, the correlation of forces. If there is some armed resistance to
the armed forces of the state, this will change the calculus, especially in a
state which claims popular legitimacy. In the eruptions of armed resistance in
the Civil Rights era, this is exactly what we saw, not so long ago, in this
country.

Even if the state constantly wins such battles, it may
suffer politically debilitating losses. (Who “won” the Newark and Detroit and
Los Angeles riots?) Its political leaders and police and military agents will
have different, more difficult, political costs to calculate. Yes, as long as
the young working-class men and women driving the tanks and shooting the really
fully automatic weapons on its behalf keep doing so, the Imperial High Command
may be able to crush everything from sporadic uprisings to a massive popular
rebellion. But it will be at great cost to the state’s legitimacy. And, human beings that they are, the
willingness of those men and women to keep doing that on behalf of their
masters – their defection calculus – will be affected not just by political and
moral appeals (Do you really want to shoot your brothers and sisters who are
fighting for their pensions?), but also by the real possibility that they might
get shot doing so. Militant, radical and revolutionary movements are filled
with hundreds of unpredictable moments of decision, which can become
game-changing tipping points. Unpredictable, but not entirely unforeseeable.

I’m pretty sure, too, that if, after the development of an
overwhelming mass movement, there is some kind crucial insurrectionary moment, it
will be settled not by the power of personal civilian weapons, but by the power
of the armed forces that the besieged state has built up for itself. The key moment is not the defeat, but the
defection, of the armed forces of the state. The ultimate power does not rest
with who starts out with the most guns, or even with who shoots them the most
(or at all), but with who ends up determining which way they are pointed. The most successful insurrectionary moment is
one in which no bullet has to be fired; everyone just has to know at whom they
will be headed if they are.

That is still a struggle over the use and control of arms. Pointing
a gun is using it.

Understanding the dynamic of radical and revolutionary
change, not repeating platitudes about how omnipotent is the state and how
unchangeable is society, is really thinking historically. I heard someone ridiculing a gun-rights
supporter on TV the other day, along these lines: Do you
realize how ridiculous you sound when you talk about tyranny or resistance to
tyranny, in the United States? Really? Let’s roll the videotape back a few
years, and try that out again: Do you
realize how ridiculous you sound when you talk about American presidents,
Republican and Democrat, torturing, kidnapping for torture, nullifying habeas corpus, spying without warrants
on everybody, setting up a
separate justice system for Muslims, rewarding billions in bonuses to bankers
who crashed the economy, offering Social Security and Medicare as sacrifices to
those bankers, aggressively prosecuting whistleblowers and journalists while
granting complete immunity and government favor to torturers and banksters,
personally overseeing the assassination of anyone they want anywhere in the
world, including American citizens, starting seven or eight secret wars? Do you realize how ridiculous you sound when
you talk about the great European social-democratic states, Socialist
governments included, overseeing forced austerity on behalf of banksters,
selling off the land and assets of their countries, reneging on the pensions of
their citizens, ushering in 25-30% unemployment, facing riots and pitched
battles with police in the streets?

Understanding that things can and will change, radically at
times, is an historical attitude. Asserting that the society and moment we live
in today is omnipotent and unchangeable –proclaiming, essentially, that history
is over – is what I understand as pure ideology. “Tyranny” – or whatever you
prefer to call it – has, not so long ago, already been here and been successfully resisted, with
non-violent and not non-violent tactics – unless you think Jim Crow doesn’t
qualify. And whatever-you-want-to-call-it is back – unless you think a regime
that practices assassination, unilateral war-making, unlimited surveillance, austerity
imposition, and issues from a completely corrupt electoral process, etc.,
doesn’t qualify. And it may well be
resisted again. I don’t know how the street protests and occupations of state
capitols and such by workers and pensioners and student debt-slaves and people
thrown out of their homes and out of their jobs may unfold in America in the near
future, but they very well may take lessons from more than the edited history
of such struggles in our country and around the world. Nothing ridiculous there, as far as I’m
concerned. History is not over.

I am certainly as stumped as Glenn
Greenwald by the unfortunate state of American political passivity he
describes (and which never ceases to amaze my foreign friends):

The real mystery from all of this is that it has not led to
greater social unrest. To some extent, both the early version of the Tea Party
and the Occupy movements were spurred by the government's protection of Wall
Street at the expense of everyone else. Still, Americans continue to be plagued
by massive unemployment, foreclosures, the threat of austerity and economic
insecurity while those who caused those problems have more power and profit
than ever. And they watch millions of their fellow citizens be put in cages for
relatively minor offenses while the most powerful are free to commit far more
serious crimes with complete impunity. Far less injustice than this has spurred
serious unrest in other societies.

According to my understanding of history, though, I would
say, “Wait a minute.” As Greenwald points out, the deep-seated problems are all
there and are likely to worsen, and the Obama effect will wear out. I’ll refer back to the example above of the Civil
Rights movement. Change – significant but not quite revolutionary change – happened,
and it happened faster, I contend, because of the reality and threat of armed
resistance.

Gun Rights and the
Problematic of Mass Killings and School
Shootings

Don’t we have to save
the children?

Just after midnight on August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman, a
25-year-old former Marine, killed his mother and wife by stabbing them in the
heart. A few hours later, he called his wife’s office to let them know she
wouldn’t be in that day, packed up an M1 .30-caliber carbine, a sawed-off 12-gauge
shotgun, a 6mm bolt-action hunting rifle, a .35 caliber pump rifle, a 9mm Luger
pistol, a 25-caliber pistol, a .357 Magnum revolver, 700+ rounds of ammunition,
Dexedrine, Excedrin, toilet paper, deodorant, and other sundries, and went up
on the Tower on the University of Texas campus in Austin, where he methodically
murdered 12 people, and wounded 32 others. Whitman picked off people – mostly
young kids in their teens and twenties – at random. From up to 1500 feet away –
no one could see it coming – he rained sudden, instant death on solitary
strollers and couples walking together – boyfriend and girlfriend, sisters.
He’d shoot first one, then the other, and then he’d shoot people who tried to
drag wounded friends and strangers to safety. This went on for almost two
hours, with police and armed citizens returning fire, until two cops and an
armed civilian got to the top of the tower, and killed Whitman. I remember it
vividly. From my safe redoubt in New York, I was terrified. It still shakes me up to think about it.

Are the guns the problem here?

This is not a flippant question. Clearly, the world would be
a better place if Charles Whitman had never had a gun that day. Does saying
that mean we are impelled to ban guns, and to effectively eliminate a
fundamental political right, criminalizing fifty million people who have done
nothing wrong? I do not think so.
Clearly, armed civilians helped minimize and end the carnage. Does saying that mean we are impelled to
recognize how wonderful guns are and how great it would be for everyone to be
packing all the time? I do not think so. For me, whatever the role of guns in
exacerbating and ending the harm caused in incidents like this, what such
incidents really demonstrate is that guns are neither the problem nor the
answer, precisely to incidents like this,
and that incidents like this are not what’s at stake in the problematic of “gun
control.”

The primary causal factor in an incident like this is
something much more powerful than a gun; it’s, for lack of a better term, a state of mind. We have all been horrified that there have
been too many mass killings by young men in opportunistic venues, with
guns. If they had been with different
weapons – one with a gun killing ten people in a school, one with an ax who
killed eight people in a mall, and one with a can of gasoline who burned
fifteen people to death in a movie theater – what would the central focus of
our concern be? What would we be asking
about why this is happening, about what might be causing more young men to
engage in spates of seemingly senseless, suicidal-homicidal mass violence,
about what we might do to recognize and eliminate, as far as possible, those
causes? What programs and policies would we be exploring? Because those are the same questions, with the same
central focus, that we should be asking now.
And that focus would not be on the weapons used.

The fundamental problem we have to deal with in incidents
like these is that, once someone is in the state of mind where he is impelled to do such a thing, he is going
to do it, with one weapon or another, and you’re going to have horror and
grief. Yes, the ability of such a person to get his hand on a gun – legally or
illegally, bolt action or semi-automatic, with or
without a “thumbhole stock,” he really won’t care – exacerbates the damage he
can do, but it is not the cause of the problem, and addressing guns in any way
does exactly nothing to address the cause of the problem. We have to look at
what causes that state of mind.

This is a very
difficult problem. As I suggested above, I do think that the ubiquitous
cultural representation of armed violence as a quick, effective, and attractive
solution for all kinds of personal and social problems is pernicious. It steers
someone in such a state of mind to go for the gun. Adam
Lanza was in the SWAT team of his mind.
But for someone in his state of mind, his choice of targets, his need to
eliminate them brutally and right now,
could as easily have come from watching a rerun of Village
of the Damnedas from playing Call
of Duty.

One thing for sure, if one wants to deal with that difficult
problem, all the hoopla about “military-style assault weapons” is pure
distraction. “Assault weapons” is a term
invented
by the gun industry to conflate civilian and military weapons for marketing
purposes, and anti-gun rights politicians have jumped on that confusion for
their own agenda. And “style” is, well,
just that. It’s clear to me, from many conversations, that a lot of people do
not understand that “semi-automatic” means “shoots one bullet per trigger pull,”
and not “fires continuously as long as you hold the trigger” (“automatic”), and
that many people think “military-style” refers to some special enhanced
functionality rather that to design components like “thumbhole
stocks” or “a pistol grip that extends beneath the action,” which do
nothing to increase the lethality of the weapon. The true power is in the
ammunition, not the rifle, and the
most powerful ammunition, loaded to bring down 300-500 pound animals, is
used in popular “hunting “ and “deer” rifles of the kind Charles Whitman used,
not in these “military-style assault weapons.”

The only item on the list of anathematized “assault weapons”
features that can be construed to have any significant functional value in this
kind of mass shooting incident is the magazine.
If you imagine that banning 100-round magazines will be helpful, go
ahead. But be aware that a knowledgeable
shooter wouldn’t use one; the Colorado movie shooter was taken down because he used a 100-round magazine,
which jammed, as they are known to do. A shooter with a 30- or 10-round
magazine, or even with a revolver and speedloaders, will still
kill a whole lot of unarmed people. And legally limiting magazine capacity to
seven bullets is just silly, as Gov. Cuomo found when he realized he had
outlawed police handguns. (Of course, he’ll re-write the law to make an
exception for those armed agents of the state.) A magazine is also a very easy item
to fabricate (as guns
themselves soon will be via the 3D printer).
Trying to stop mass shootings by outlawing large-capacity magazines is like
going after lung cancer by outlawing big cigarette cases.

This “assault weapons” burst of gun control fervor may make
you feel like you’re doing something about mass shootings and saving the
children, but it’s as much a silly shortcut around the real problem as is the
idea that everyone packing heat is going to make us suddenly free of
tyranny. The only way you can make
yourself feel that you’ve substantially eliminated the damage guns do in such
situations is by outlawing all guns, handguns included, and believing that will actually mean that guns will not be
available. And, after all the personal, political, and social energy spent trying
to capture and imprison everyone with an “assault weapon” having a “thumbhole stock”
or a handgun with an eight-round magazine, or a 3D printer, after all the (even
further) erosion of constitutional protections against search and seizure, and further
militarization of police and SWAT teams, and further filling of the prisons
with people who had never done any harm to any other human being, you would not
have done one thing – not one single thing – to address the cause(s) of the
problem you were claiming to want to solve.

If you want to address the fundamental problem in these kinds of incidents, then you’d
better look somewhere else, at something that can explain the state of mind
that drives them. Charles Whitman, who was medicating himself with Valium and
Dexedrine, had, the autopsy revealed, a glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor
that would have killed him within a year. Before the shootings, he had visited
a psychiatrist, who noted:
“This massive, muscular youth seemed to be oozing with hostility … He readily
admits having overwhelming periods of hostility with a very minimum of
provocation. Repeated inquiries … were not too successful with the exception of
his vivid reference to 'thinking about going up on the tower with a deer rifle
and start shooting people'.”

So, fair question or not:
Were the guns the problem there?

In April 2001, 16-year-old Cory Baadsgaard took a rifle to
his high school in Washington state and held 23 classmates and a teacher
hostage. Fortunately, he didn’t kill anybody.
After being held for 14 months, he was released under community
supervision, based on the testimony of psychiatrists about the adverse effects
of the drugs he was taking. Cory remembered nothing of his violence. The
incident took place after he had been switched, cold-turkey, from Paxil to a
high dose of Effexor to treat "situational depression."

"The morning that Cory went to school and did what
he did, my wife and I just knew that it had to be something with the drugs.
That morning he had taken about 300 milligrams of Effexor, and I thought it was
something about him going off one of the drugs and then the high dose of the
other. One of Cory's friends told us that Cory was yelling and then he just
stopped, looked down and saw the gun in his hand and woke up.…I guess I could
blame myself for having the gun available, but if I'd known then just what
these drugs could do it would have been the drugs that would not have been in
our home. They always talk about how the kids who do these things are the ones
who get picked on by the jocks and stuff, but Cory was a jock. He was on the
varsity basketball team, played football and golf, and was very popular in
school. I pray every night that the media will get ahold of this issue. If Cory
had been on PCP the media would say 'Oh, he needs drug rehabilitation,' but
because these were prescribed medications they say 'Oh, it can't be that,' but
now we know it can be."11

How about it? Were the guns the problem there? The
fundamental, causal problem? If Cory had killed those 23 kids, would it be
pistol grips and thumbhole stocks we should be obsessing about?

Both Paxil’s and Effexor’s manufacturers’ inserts state explicitly that the drugs “increase the risk of suicidal behavior,”
and that analysis of “antidepressant drugs (SSRIs and others) showed
that these drugs increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior
(suicidality) in children, adolescents, and young adults (ages 18-24).”

Columbine? Perhaps you missed the story of Mark Allen Taylor, who was shot at least six times by Columbine
shooter Eric Harris. At the time of the
shooting, Harris had taken Luvox for his anger, anxiety, depression,
disorganized thoughts, homicidal thoughts, suspiciousness and a temper – having
been switched from Zoloft. Taylor, along
with a New Jersey police officer who killed six people while on Luvox, sued
Solvay, the drug’s maker. (Matthew Beck, from Connecticut, who killed four of
his co-workers and himself while on Luvox, couldn’t join them.) Taylor said: "I'm suing
Solvay because I believe that Eric Harris did what he did because of this
drug.” Dr. Peter Breggin’s report to the court stated: "[At] the time he
committed multiple homicides and suicide, Eric Harris was suffering from a
substance induced (Luvox-induced) mood disorder with depressive and manic
features that had reached a psychotic level of violence and suicide….Absent
persistent exposure to Luvox, Eric Harris probably would not have committed
violence and suicide."12

Paxil, Effexor, and Luvox are on
Time Magazine’s list of the “Top Ten Legal Drugs
Linked to Violence.” (Respectively,
10.3x, 8.3x, and 8.4x more likely to be associated with violence than other
drugs.) In a
2001 study, Yale researchers
reported that 8.1 percent of all admissions to a university psychiatric
hospital were “owing to antidepressant-associated mania or psychosis.”35
If the same percentage of all the 10.7 million US psychiatric hospital
admissions at the time of the study were ”antidepressant-associated” manic or
psychotic episodes, that would be 860,000 people.

As one researcher testified to the FDA about drugs of this type: “We have never seen drugs so similar to LSD and PCP as
these SSRI antidepressants. All of these drugs produce dreaming during periods
of wakefulness.”13

Let’s make sure we eliminate those pistol grips.

Did these SSRI-antidepressants cause these mass shootings,
or the other 60+ incidents of school violence of the kind we’re so
horrified about that are also linked to antidepressant drugs?41 I
don’t know. I don’t know because, well, there isn’t much talk, investigation or
concern about that, what with the hunt for “military-style” guns taking up so
much attention.

It’s a complicated question, because, as one Italian
researcher noted: "Antidepressant-induced mania is not simply a
temporary and reversible phenomenon, but a complex biochemical mechanism of
illness deterioration.” It’s not just a matter of what drug you take, but of
how doctors now cycle kids through one antidepressant after another. It’s often
the withdrawal phase of a drug that causes the most problems: “As patients are
switched from one antidepressant to another or to a polypharmacy regimen, their
illness may be propelled ‘into a refractory phase, characterized by low
remission, high relapse and high intolerance.’ Antidepressants increase the
risk of a ‘switch’ into mania, and thus into bipolar illness.”

(There is no verification of what drugs Adam Lanza was
taking. As of January
11th, the toxicology report on his autopsy was still “weeks”
away.)

I do think that those who are concerned about these mass
shootings, and about the increase in the number of these incidents over the last
15 years, might want to spend at least as much time and energy looking at
factors that could actually be causing
the extremely bizarre states of mind that propel adolescents and young adults
into such violence, as they do haranguing society about exacerbating factors.
Because I know that guns do not cause these states of mind.

What changes have taken place in American society over the
past couple of decades that are likely to be producing these states of mind
more often among adolescents and young adults? Is it that evolution produced a
new generation of excitable
boys, genetically predisposed to psychotic violence? That guns are intrinsically more lethal (ask
Charles Whitman), or more prone to jump into young people’s hands? Or that kids are, for the first time in
history, being constantly dosed with powerful, psychoactive, literally
mind-altering, drugs, whose effects have been seriously and repeatedly
challenged (even if in ways that are kept largely invisible to most media
consumers)?

The most deadly school massacre in American history was not
Sandy Hook. It occurred in 1927, in Bath, Michigan.
Andrew Kehoe bludgeoned his wife to death, firebombed his house and farm
buildings, blew up the Bath Consolidated School with explosives he had secretly
planted for months, killing 38 grade-school children, and then blew himself up
in his truck filled with dynamite and shrapnel, taking out the school
superintendent and a few others.43

No guns. A state of mind. It’ll find a way.

(OK, he did use a rifle to detonate the dynamite in his
truck. Not the same.)

I had a pretty tough holiday season, including the death of a close family member. In the midst of all that, seeing the faces and imagining the last moments of those 20 children
killed at Sandy Hook shook me to the core. I’d
really like to see a discussion of how a young man like Adam Lanza could set
himself to do such a thing. Tirades against pistol grips and magazines, and
attempts to criminalize fifty-million people who have done nothing wrong, aren’t
doing it for me. They are not that discussion, and only divert from it.

So, the right to own guns is a fundamental political right,
and guns don’t cause psychosis-driven mass shootings, therefore no regulations,
right?

Wrong. No right is “god-given” or “natural” (although there
are some that we, for good reason, treat in our socio-political discourse as if they were). Rights are the
achievements of historical struggle, which, in my book, makes them even more
precious. Nor are rights absolute. The “free-speech” right comes as close as you
can for me, but there’s still “Fire!”-in-a-crowded-theater. It is not plausible
that, in any modern society, guns would be entirely unregulated. No modern state is going to allow the
unregulated possession of Stingers or fifty-caliber machine guns.

There will be gun regulation, and there is, a lot of it. And,
often, in those toddling
towns where the regulation is “toughest,”
gun violence is highest. I’m not sure
what else we need, but I’ll listen. Let’s have a discussion about reasonable
gun regulations that, on all sides, firmly and sincerely recognizes that gun
ownership is a fundamental political right, which deserves a place of honor on
our wall of historical achievements.

Given that shared assumption, we can proceed to confront all
the devils in the details. Some regulations I will find legitimate. I can’t go
on about the dangers of states of mind, and then object to any notion of a
background check. I do object, however, to those proposals that are silly
(“military-style”) and whose main purpose is to train citizens into more
thorough compliance, to those that have no respect for what the fundamental
right of gun ownership means, to those that have obvious confiscatory intent
(register and re-register everything), and to those that will criminalize
fifty-million people who have done nothing wrong. Like the New York State law passed by Cuomo. “I support the Second Amendment, I really do.
You can keep your musket and your Derringer,” is transparently insincere,
and won't cut it.

Above all, let’s not, because of a fearful reaction to
horrific events, jump on gun-control proposals that are not going to stop those horrors, and will play into an elite agenda
of complete citizen disempowerment and loss of hard-won rights. That is exactly
what we have done since 9/11, and it is past time to say, ”No more!”

One of the things I’m open to is the idea that a prospective
gun owner should have to get some training. (At no expense, of course. It’s a
right, and if it’s reasonable for the state to require training to exercise
it, it’s necessary for the state to provide that training for everybody, of
every class, who wants it.) I’ve fired
guns, and learned how to handle them – and I actually think everybody should,
which I also think would help change the debate – but, as I said, I don’t own
any. Haven’t felt the need for it. If I moved to one of those dangerous
neighborhoods, like the pretty towns in New Jersey or Colorado I have visited,
where the bears come in to use your swimming pool, I might feel that need real
quick. (I’m
with Stephen Colbert on the bears.) The
only thing that might get me to rush out and purchase a gun, as it’s already
got 2.2 million people to do, is the threat that my right to do so was
about to be eliminated.45 And I might now have to consider going
armed, to fend off those of my liberal friends who will come gunning for me
after reading this.

Update (2/3/2013): I removed an incorrect number from the chart on "Big Killers."

Update (2/10/2013): I removed statement suggesting that all of Charles Whitman's rifles were bolt-action. The M-1 had a semi-automatic mechanism.

*Update (4/16/2013) Sentence added ("The
concentration of wealth, and the concentration of armed power, in the hands of a
few, are both bad ideas. And the one has
everything to do with the other.")Update (2/9/2014): "Public Unaware." A couple of recent charts::

1“The totalitarian states can do great things,
but there is one thing they cannot do, they cannot give the factory worker a
rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle
hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the
symbol of democracy. It is our job to see it stays there.”

"The Complete Works of George Orwell", Edited by
Peter Davison, 1998, volume 12 of the 20 volume set. Pages 362-365 contain a
reprint of the entire article, "Don't Let Colonel Blimp Ruin the Home
Guard," Evening Standard, 8 January 1941.

As the quote indicates, King never eschewed violence entirely. Early
in his career, King’s home was described as an “arsenal” of guns, with armed
supporters often posted to prevent a Klan assassination. King even applied for a concealed carry
permit, which was refused by the local police in Alabama, who “used any wiggle
room in the law to discriminate against African Americans" – an historical
example used by advocates of “shall issue” vs. “may issue” laws about carry
permits. (Adam Winkler, “MLK
and His Guns.”)

And there’s Gandhi’s famous quote: “Among the many misdeeds
of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole
nation of arms as the blackest.” The
full context doesn’t make it any better for anti-gun-rights faux-pacifists. The
quote continues: “If we want the Arms Act to be repealed, if we want to learn
the use of arms, here is a golden opportunity. If the middle classes render
voluntary help to Government in the hour of its trial, distrust will disappear,
and the ban on possessing arms will be withdrawn.” Gandhi was exhorting Indians to join the
British army in WWI, as a tactical move that might persuade the British of
their loyalty, thereby hastening the repeal of the hated Arms Act, and at the
same time getting training that might later be useful in the independence
struggle.

The Arms Act was one of a series of
measures adopted by the British in response to a serious Indian rebellion, the
mutiny of 1857: “[T]the Indian masses were systematically being disarmed and
the means of local firearm production destroyed, to ensure that they (the
Indian masses) would never again have the means to rise in rebellion against
their colonial masters. Towards this end the colonial government … brought into
existence the Indian Arms Act, 1878 (11 of 1878); an act which, exempted
Europeans and ensured that no Indian could possess a weapon of any description
unless the British masters considered him a "loyal" subject of the
British Empire.” http://www.abhijeetsingh.com/arms/india/

And let’s not even get into Gandhi’s even more notorious: “We adopted it [the weapon of non-violence] out of our
helplessness. If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the
British.”

The full quote is debated, with some suggesting that
Gandhi’s ”we” was not meant to include himself and his movement and/or that he
was really trying to emphasize the power of non-violence. I’m not persuaded,
but judge for yourself: “Had we adopted non-violence as the
weapon of the strong, because we realised that it was more effective than any
other weapon, in fact the mightiest force in the world, we would have made use
of its full potency and not have discarded it as soon as the fight against the
British was over or we were in a position to wield conventional weapons. But
as I have already said, we adopted it out of our helplessness. If we had the
atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.”

The general point: For both MLK and Gandhi: “No Justice, No Peace” was,
I would suggest, a more cogent slogan than “Disarm the People.”

8Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, has
been one of the most influential books on the history and philosophy of
science. In it, Kuhn argues that the
history of scientific thought and practice is not steadily and continuously
incremental. It is marked, rather, by
periods of conceptual stability – “normal science” – that are interrupted by
conjunctures of “revolutionary science” which cause comprehensive and radical
"paradigm shifts.”

This is an exceedingly well-written and -argued essay. I've long tried to convince my progressive and socialist friends that opposition to civilian gun ownership (and the necessary corollary, the state monopoly on arms) is a thoroughly un-progressive thought, philosophically and historically speaking.

Very thoughtful piece. Agreed with most of it, except the author's continual insistence that the right to self defense (by use of firearm) is merely a political right. Self defense is a basic human right. And there certainly are several God-given (or natural) rights as well. Any and all of them may and have been violated at one time or another, which underscores the necessity of vigilance, holding the violators responsible (regardless of their positions), and teaching successive generations about the importance of respecting and securing these rights. Apathy and cowardice are the real enemies of freedom.

I've been making many of the same arguments for years. I have been unable to convince them (except for my wife!) that this is not a "left vs. right" issue, but an issue of "individual vs. the State" and "taking responsibility vs. outsourcing violence".

Most of my friends feel free to dismiss those arguments because they're accustomed to hearing those arguments only from "the right".

Thank you Thank you Thank you for putting this whole thing in perspective. Every thinking person in America should read this (granted, that's only about 50%, but that's still a high number). I applaud your research, organization and your writing. Color me a new and eager reader.

I made it to the end! Thank you for writing this thoughtful piece. It articulated all of the things that I've been thinking about this issue in the last few years, but didn't feel free enough to discuss with my friends, for fear of being ostracized as a gun crazy.

I don't agree with the anti-psych fear-mongering. This is a multifaceted issue with no easy out. I think we have to remember that as long as freedom exists, people are going to misuse it. So which is more valuable - Individual Liberty or Child Safety? I have to say I'm siding with George Carlin on this one.

Thanks to eveyone for the kind comments. I put a lot of effort into it, and I know it's a long read, so I appreciate that so many took the time to go through it carefully, and "get" it. Please do distribute widely, on your own sites, in your own posts, in comments sections of other sites, etc.

A couple of responses:

To S. James: I'm not "anti-psych." I know that psycotropic drugs can help people. I do think there are a lot of issues about them, especially in the way they are serially prescrbed to kids that have not been sufficiently explored, questions that are extremely relevant in this context, and --my point- completely crowded out by "gun control."

To Mike M: I can't go with you on the language of "god-given," although, as I said, I think there are good reasons t treat seom rightst as if they were "natural" or "god-given." I have no problem with saying "Self defense is a basic human right." And all that's involved in the "right to bear arms" goes beyond that., and is inextricably political. Besides, in my understanding, any notion of "right," no matter how "naturally" the woird comes to us, is the product of a contested historical and political development. In many human societies and polities, there wee whole classes of people who did not have the "right" to self-defense or anything else, and for whom the whole notion of "human right" would be unthinkable. The whole idea of a rights-entitled "humanity" or "individual" is a relatively recent historical development.

I'm not "anti-psych." I know that psycotropic drugs can help people. I do think there are a lot of issues about them, especially in the way they are serially prescrbed to kids, that have not been sufficiently explored and are extremely relevant in this context, and --my point- completely crowded out by "gun control."

I can't go with you on the language of "god-given," although, as I said, I think there are good reasons t treat seom rightst as if they were "natural" or "god-given." I have no problem with saying "Self defense is a basic human right." And all that's involved in the "right to bear arms" goes beyond that., and is inextricably political. Besides, in my understanding, any notion of "right," no matter how "naturally" the woird comes to us, is the product of a contested historical and political development. In many human societies and polities, there wee whole classes of people who did not have the "right" to self-defense or anything else, and for whom the whole notion of "human right" would be unthinkable. The whole idea of a rights-entitled "humanity" or "individual" is a relatively recent historical development.

The causal, legal, and moral links between a law-abiding gun owner in, say, Alaska or Idaho and the shootings in Newtown are much more tenuous than the same links between military/police injustice and Americans in general.

I hate to quibble on this point, because the rest of the piece was so excellent, but I'm with Mike M here. The relative recency of human rights as a popular concept doesn't really diminish their claim to "deontology" status. Show me a society in which no person believes he has the right to self-defense, and I'll show you a society in which each individual is entitled to the right anyway.

Anyway, thanks so much for this piece. You started with great intuitions and then actually put the work in to build them out. A rarity on this topic especially.

It has long been my feeling that the right, which presumes to have the microphone on the gun rights issue, would be surprised to know just how many on the left own and carry firearms. Sadly, most of the left would also be surprised. Many gun owning liberals, myself included, stay quiet in the face of the typical horror expressed by our political peers towards firearms. Thank you for giving voice to what many already believe.

Pretty thoughtful. But here's the problem. The lunatic fringe of gun-abusers -- for lack of a better term -- is a problem for ALL of us, and the conservatives should be equally irate at them as are the liberals. But if they are, it is too often lost in the whole wrap-yourself-up-in-the-flag rhetoric. You do say:

[I think there should be fewer guns. I think we should have a more pacific society, one in which violence isn’t as alluring as apple pie, and we don’t have street parties to celebrate assassinations. I definitely think that the cultural representation of armed violence as a quick, effective, and attractive solution for all kinds of personal and social problems, which is ubiquitous in America, is ridiculous and pernicious. The answer to that is to do a lot of determined political and cultural work, not to pass a law and call in the armed police, the courts, and the penal system to enforce it on people who have done nothing wrong.]

But you never once in all of this take the conservatives to task for ignoring this. The moment you say "I think there should be fewer guns," the conservatives erupt into apoplectic rage, which just adds to the unease the liberals have.

I think "right" is not the correct word, more like an ability than a "right". If a cheetah chases down a gazelle, the gazelle's means of defense is to run. It doesn't have the "right" to run, as in, there is someone or something out there that is allowing the gazelle to run, but more like it has the ability to use it's defense mechanism as it feels necessary. I'm saying that no one has the right to infringe on my god-given ABILITY to defend myself with whatever tools I choose are necessary in that particular situation (although there is a lot of gray area when it comes to the extreme end of the spectrums ie total disarmament or using a rocket launcher). In saying that, defending yourself is a God given ability.

Stereotyping all gun owners and magically linking them to this tragedy is not indicative of a moral high ground but instead a sign of irrational logic. We shouldn't paint people with one brush merely because the narrative spun by MSNBC demands it of you.

MM:This also stuck out at me + was 'misfit' for Foundational understanding of our birth-tho so much here WE could heartily agree with. As They stated to Britain - "...,and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Natures God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." = ",that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,..." = "And for the support of this Declaration, with firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." These men agreed from "WHERE" our 'Rights' come from[not came from], and is a Judeo/Christian perspective in their final analysis decreeing it to be 'the law of our land[PEOPLE]'. Unlike France or anyone else!

I would suggest that the right to bear arms is really better understood as your right to *exist*. Said right is not guaranteed by cops with badges or a scrap of paper called the Constitution, but ultimately by one's individual ability to deal lethal force against any aggressor. Looked at this way, I do consider it a "God given" right.

Also, a semi-auto is not all that much less effective than a full auto weapon. The latter is really most useful when (a) laying down a suppressive fire or (b) repelling human wave attacks. Neither function is especially needed for insurgent warfare (though, curiously, the latter can be useful against home invasion type attacks). Remember, in the early phases of the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion in 1979, they had little more than antique WWI bolt actions, and yet caused significant damage to the Soviet army, in spite of all its tanks, aircraft, machine guns, etc.

As for background checks, I would put forth the proposition that anyone to dangerous to entrust with a gun, is too dangerous to entrust with a car, a pair of scissors, or even a *vote*,

You must have a very very low opinion of your country's armed forces if you think citizen militias armed with pistols and rifles pose any meaningful impediment against an out-of-control government. FYI, the rest of the first world has been living without the constitutionally enshrined right to own a shooting toy for a very long time, and so far we've done an okay job of not having that tyranny thing.

Not quite. When talking about *control* - it is always implemented, in the end, by agents of the state on foot. Armed citizenry can make things very uncomfortable for, and grind to a halt the machinery of, the state. Even though the military superiority of the state would prevail in an open and direct conflict.

I repeat: pick up a book, and read a little, because this hasn't been true in decades, especially when it comes to insurgencies. Occupying forces in Afghanistan and Iraq are directly supported by aircraft, UAVs, and armoured vehicles. In addition, real insurgents reply on bombs, anti-tank, weapons, machine guns, and automatics to make a dent, not the kind of crap you could find in a walmart.

Lanza's mother was a law-abiding gun owner until her son killed her and took her guns. The Aurora shooter obtained his guns legally, which meant that he was also a law abiding gun owner until he wasn't.

In a pitched battle, of course the power of the armed State would prevail. But in an asymetrical conflict, an insurgency, the situation could be very different.

For all its undeniable power, the effectiveness of the American military against insurgents in both Iraq and Afghanistan has been... let's be generous and call it "somewhat mixed." To think that they would be more effective in fighting fellow-Americans, toward whose aspirations at least some of them might reasonably be expected to have some sympathy, strikes me as more than a trifle optimistic.

Suggesting that any gun owner has the tool-set needed to become an insurgent of any stripe because they have guns is very, very, very silly. The ones in Afghanistan and Iraq use bombs, rockets, and occasionally machine guns along with fully automatic rifles to make a nuisance of themselves, not with the sort of kit allowed under the second amendment. Despite that type of of heavy armament however, casualty ratios are still hilariously lopsided in favour of coalition forces. Am I the last person in north america who even vaguely remembers either war?

Because seeing as most gun advocates seem to have totally forgotten about the last 10 years, I figured I also might bring up Mali, where the french army (woefully less powerful compared to their US counterparts), totally routed the rebel forces in a matter of weeks without losing more then a single man.

You might consider expanding your view of racism in the equation in light of FBI uniform crime statistics on gun violence and the huge micro-climate effects on its distribution.

The simple fact is that young black males (at roughly 4% of the population) account for well over half the firearms violence in America. The neighborhoods in which they live are hugely more dangerous than those in which they don't. The white urban gun control advocate lives next door to these centers of violence and is simultaneously scared.and determined to preserve political correctness for fear of being labeled racist, even though gun control is one of the most explicitly racist of policies. As an aside, if you colored Zip codes red which were in the upper decile of gun violence, the map you would get is essentially identical to Obama's "landslide" map.

When and where have you seen this discussed? Not in the press, which is capable of reporting only anonymous or decidedly white gun violence.. And certainly not from Obama's bully pulpit, which ignores the decidely racial makeup of gun violence. And absolutely not from the pulpits of the Reverends, that seem to notice only in those rare instances of white-on black violence. This is cowardice.

I loved your article. You should correct one fact, however. M-1 rifles are, indeed, semi-automatic, not bolt-action as you suggest, even though they use clips, not magazines (there is a difference). That aside, great article! Thank you!

Changing weapons simply requires one to change tactics. Weapons and tactics go together. The trick is never to fight the other guy's fight. It is also possible to win the battles, but lose the war. This is precisely what happened to the US in Viet Nam, when US forces focused on tactics, but the North Viet Namese fought a strategic political and informational war.

I guess it depends on who you think the Conservatives are. "Liberals" think Tea Party people and libertarians are Conservatives. Conservatives think Tea Party people and libertarians are Liberals. In our society, it seems that both left and right want violence, just for different reasons, but that was pointed out early on in the article.

Max, if your point is to illustrate the technical, strategic and tactical superiority of the US armed forces over an untrained group of people with some rifles, I would agree with you. But that's not really an argument against The Polemicist's piece, or gun rights. I believe that the argument being made is that gun control is a metric in the balance of power between the citizenry and a government that may not have the citizens' best interests in mind. For example:

"Smart meters" that some power companies in the US are putting on people's homes are creating angst in the right wing press. Now, I think "smart meters" sound kind of neat, and don't object to them. But there a couple stories about women objecting to their power companies coming on to their property and installing them. And when the police are called, whom do the police haul off to jail? The women. Of course, the power company owns the meter, and contractually (I believe) has the right to service their property. But the power company and/or the municipal authorities overseeing the power company are able to summon the police -- the armed police -- to enforce their claim in ways that the average citizen is not. If I have a contract that says you owe me $20 and I storm over to your house to collect it, I can't call the cops to back me up. If anything, you'll call the police with a complaint of trespass, and likely neither of us will be inconvenienced by a trip "downtown". Now, if I have to take you to small claims court, why shouldn't the power company? Is it that the company's corporate counsel is too white shoe to deal with the lunch pail public? Wouldn't an attorney really be better suited to come along with the meter installation crew, not an armed sheriff? Better, but not faster. Or cheaper. These women's taxes go to paying the police that enforce corporate claims against them.

And don't get me started on the armed marshals hounding the bankrupted seed dealers who by no fault of their own had some Monsanto-patented seeds in their silos. Corporate attorneys win the case, and taxpayer-funded armed police enforce with muscle.

Finally, if AR 15s and Glocks don't confer an advantage, why do our police carry them? In this national "conversation" about gun control, I say, "you first".

This was super helpful, it aligns with a lot of my feelings on this topic and I will be re-reading it again. Next time one of my more liberal friends tells me they can't respect the 2nd Amendment, I'll just smile and walk away. OTOH if they ask me to defend it, I'll have plenty to say. Keep up the great work.

First, if guns confer no power to people as democratic citizens, then any point about 'the balance of power' is very wrong, because no 'power' is really being transferred.

Secondly, so then what? Should you stick a gun in the faces of the company workers? Smash one in the face and hold them hostage until the power company bends to your demands and stop doing something you don't like? Or do you drive over to their head corporate offices and hold the board of directors at gunpoint? Or are they just supposed to be afraid of your gun? Because that has nothing to do with your rights or your power as a citizen living in a liberal democracy, that's just twisted vigilante justice.

Third, AR15s and Glocks provide 'power' over your fellow citizens, not over government, and that's completely antithetical to the whole idea of democracy. Police do and should carry them because it is their role in society to ensure that law and order is upheld.

"Police do and should carry them because it is their role in society to ensure that law and order is upheld." on behalf of existing power.

Is someone refusing a new power meter a real threat to public safety, or is it an inconvenience to the corporation? Is someone growing corn that has Monsanto DNA in it without paying MON for it putting lives at risk? Is this the "order" that armed police are trying to uphold? No, guns are not, or should not be, required to solve non-violent dispute.

The solution isn't hostage taking or threats of death. The solution is for both parties to come to some sort of legal resolution peacefully. If the power company wins, then the person could either allow the meter to be installed or accept canceling the contract and having the power shut off. That's what happened in one case.

And a single gun can have power over government. Look at what Chris Dorner's gun is doing to LA.

The question of gun ownership is totally and completely divorced from the issue of your rights as a citizen, so I'm not sure why you keep bringing it up. A 9mm will not make you less of a victim to asshole traffic cops, or make the power company somehow less likely to screw you over. A glock will not 'ensure that both parties come to an equal solution'. It's not a deterrent, and the power company isn't going to think 'boy, we'd better not cut off this guy's power because he has a gun!'

Max, you really need to up your meds. Every post I've read by you is mis - construed and twisted to fit your own biases and world view. Clearly, there is no reasoning or talking with you. Facts presented will be denied or you will claim that is not what they really mean. You try to come across as some intellectual, who's knowledge and grasp of the human condition exceeds everyone else's. What you fail to realize is you come off as immature, smug, arrogant and egomaniacal. Quite the opposite of your own self image. You contribute nothing to the conversation and, quite frankly, hold everyone back.

Individual liberty wins every time. That is, if you are really concerned about children and the world they will inherit. If not, you are just using the children as an emotional base to your collectivist arguments.

Excellent article, but to those who keep awarding it "the best" honors, I would recommend they google Jeff Snyder's column (not the book) "A Nation of Cowards," first published in 1993. ANOC comes at the philosophical and moral question differently, but I'd say both this column and that one provide a more balanced view of why free men (and women) would be armed.

Being armed is actually FAR MORE about attitude (and the respect it must engender on the part of both freelance and state criminals) than it is about firing small pieces of lead through the body parts of others. 99.99999999% of people own guns NOT to shoot others but to lessen the need to ever do so.

So the author threw in a bunch of stuff about genocide for the sake of trivia did he? He didn't just post a link saying 'Of Holocaust and Gun Control'? Dear me, maybe it is time to take my meds, because I'm hallucinating like crazy.

Individual liberty has been noticeably chopped back for FAR less (I'm aware many seem to have forgotten the Iraq War and Afghanistan already, but please oh please tell me somebody still remembers 9/11).

Woefully? France is considered the 6th most powerful military force in the world behind only the US, Russia, China, India and the UK (and many would put them ahead of the last two) - not numerically, but "effectively". Not so sure I'd call them "woefully less powerful" than anyone. And I think it could be argued that sheer casualties don't necessarily translate to political victories. Viet Nam comes to mind...

Yes. ^THIS^. I am dumbfounded by the fact that I have to tap-dance around this issue more often than not in NYC. I am reminded of this piece: http://throwinglead.com/index.php?page=liberals_2nd_amendment reading yours. Well done sir.

6th place is pretty far behind, considering that the US has about 30 times as many aircraft and I-don't-know however many times more armoured vehicles. But you're quite right in that political victory is something else entirely, and that an armed insurrection would be indicative of some very serious problems.

The thing to realize is that throwing American citizens into a meatgrinder against the singular most advanced and powerful military in the history of humankind in a misguided attempt at revolution is probably the worst method to create political change possibly imaginable, even in the worst case scenario where the government goes full on national socialist and America has changed it's name to the FSA.

You must have a very low opinion of the average US service-member if you think the majority of us will enforce such a blatantly illegal and unconstitutional order. Most of us serve because we value freedom and the American way of life, not out of blind loyalty to either the president of the government. My oat of enlistment states that I will uphold and defend the Constitution FIRST.

You also underestimate just how easy it is to fabricate this "advanced hardware" you speak of. Middle Easterners with little to no education have been using it to blow us up for a decade now, often simply with home-made explosives.

Even still, the objective would not necessarily to win strategically or militarily. Just like the initial revolution, it would be a battle of attrition. Not that I'm saying that we're at the point that this is necessary. But it's not that hard either.

First, Wallmart has everything one would need to make a perfectly serviceable RPG/mortar/cannon. Really. A rocket launcher is nothing but a metal tube and a trigger. Second, don't ignore everyone with Class III permits and NFA stamps. The numbers are significant in certain locales. That means they already have full-auto weaponry. Third, many amateur gunsmiths and any professional ones worth their salt can make an AR full-auto by changing the sear (a part many of them could make from scratch) and a few other parts/springs. It's not that hard. Americans have SIGNIFICANTLY more resources available to them as insurgents, more so than any other place I can imagine. It's a bye-product of our glutinous consumerism. If any people had a chance of "winning" an asymmetric conflict against anyone, it would be Americans. I also think you're forgetting about the sympathetic police forces (there are already Sheriffs that have stated they wouldn't enforce another "assault weapon" ban), many of whom are militarized, as well as the number of actual military units that would "defect" to fight against a tyrannical government. I think any "insurgency" here would quickly degrade into a full-blown civil war, assuming it did in fact have just reason to begin.

Which unconstitutional order? Are you talking about the Patriot Act? The NDAA? I guess I missed the patriotic insurrection that erupted when the federal government threw out the 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments out like so much bathwater, so you'll apologize if I'm a tad skeptical of your oath to the constitution.

As for explosives, I mentioned those in the post you quoted.

Now, I'm not qualified to pass judgements on how hard a real insurrection would be against the U.S. armed forces would or would not be, but the fact that Al Qaeda, one of the most powerful terrorist organizations in recent history, an organization that has ruled nations, is now reduced to scattered clusters of cells after the uninterrupted series of unstoppable curb-stomps we called a 'war' would suggest that it's probably much harder then you're suggesting, particularly when insurrections and rebellions within the continental united states have a very poor historical track record when it comes to facing down the federal government (even during a time the only advantage the most powerful armies had over the common farmer was better training and numbers).

The suggest that a rebellion could just materialize out of nowhere from a population with exactly zero experience and take down the most powerful government in history taxes the suspension of disbelief.

First, making a metal tube that can launch a shooty rocket made of explodey stuff is not the same thing as making a military-grade anti-tank weapon capable of reliably penetrating AFV armour and effectively assaulting infantry (The chinese were doing it back in the goddamn 12th century), because there's plenty of such weapons developed in military RND departments that fail to do even that.

Second, yes, a few hardcore collectors. I'm sure the folks pentagon are quaking in their shiny booties.

Third, I very much doubt american citizens have 'more at their disposal' then gigantic stockpiles of soviet firepower at your average walmart.

Fourth and finally, if the space nazi's have been elected to the senate, the house of reps, and the whitehouse, they will most definitely have the support of the pentagon and probably the majority of the population. Never forget that Hitler was elected.

I know, and neither does a non-existent rebellion from a well-fed and sedentary population with zero experience with any sort of military campaigning. That's the point. A rebellion against the US government isn't feasible, realistic, or even possible, especially with civilian firearms, so people should get the idea out of their heads.

If you're worried about tyranny, then beat it before it even begins by lobbying and voting, because that's sort of the whole point of democracy in the first place. THAT'S the power you have, not your gun. The only thing that will guarantee and safeguard it's continued existence is it's continued use.

I'm actually debating these points in earnest. So, if you want to be snide I'm sure I can find someone to make a "shooty rocket with explody stuff" that you can stand in front of and we'll see if it matters whether or not it penetrates reactive armor. That's not the point here. Re-read the above text and consider that it's unlikely (IMO) that any conflict in the US that caused an insurgency would be a bunch of guys with Glocks and ARs trying to fight the US War Machine. Having an armed populace is much more than just about that. And don't be silly, I single handedly nuked all the space nazis with my 40 watt phased plasma rifle. All your base will belong to us.

Indeed, I've made that point a few times as well, and any real life insurgency relies primarily on IEDs of some sort. The problem is that the ability to make a bunch of illegal explosives with chemicals doesn't really relate to gun rights or how that may or may not affect the populace's ability to contest the government's monopoly of force.

At the same time saying that some determined patriots could rustle up anti-tank missiles with a few trips to the supermarket is a tad silly, so I apologize if I have difficulty taking the notion seriously.

I think it does, because IEDs aren't the only issue or means at play here. Guns certainly do factor into the equation, as does ammunition (and maybe even more so for the ammo).

And I never said you could make an anti-tank missile from a few trips to the grocery, but rather it was actually quite easy to make an RPG/mortar/cannon with items readily available at Wallmart. I've no inclination to build such a device, or to test one one's effectiveness. But the idea that building weapons, IEDs, guns or otherwise isn't silly in an insurgency.

The sort that's sold to your average citizen definitely are. You can talk about machining semi-autos into full autos and the occasional die-hard with a browning all you like, but it's not even remotely comparable to the firepower groups like the Taliban have to bring to the table if they want to have any chance of doing anything.

If talk of building rockets out of stuff from home hardware wasn't about effectiveness then why bring it up? Sure you could get together some model rocket engines, throw together some stuff that goes 'bang' from a high school chemistry set and stick it all into some plastic tubing and have a serviceable 'rocket launcher', but pretending that it's anything like making a HEAT warhead is pretty ignorant.

As an Army veteran, the whole talk of needing a rocket, homemade or otherwise to stop an armored vehicle is silly, and is a straw man. Without going into details, suffice it to say that, yes, you can stop a tank/tank crew with the contents from a supermarket,wall-mart, 7-11, gas station, etc. You can ground a jet for weeks/months with a few stray BB's from a Daisey BB gun (assuming you catch it on the ground, and lets be frank, while they can refuel while airborne, they DO have to land to re-arm) let alone rifle fire. Most combat veterans know this kind of stuff, and we're technically part of the 'civilians' who would be potentially opposing the state in this fantasy.

This is a straw man, and a very bad one at that. you can't compare the effectiveness of the US military fighting foreigners on foreign soil to the US military fighting it's own fellow countrymen, on their own collective soil.

Despite the fact that firing on civilians is an unlawful order most combat soldiers will refuse to follow, soldiers have families. Those families have homes within the communities the military would be asked to fight against/in. Those soldiers would come from those same communities, they eventually leave service back to those same communities.

Among the solders who would fire on civilians... they're irreplaceable once the shooting starts. Whos going to enlist knowing they'll be asked to fire on their friends and family? Who in the military is going to train them, knowing that they will be firing on THEIR friends and families?

Where are you going to safely rearm these soldiers who would fire on their countrymen? For the sake of argument, lets assume that those in the military who won't obey an unlawful order simply disappear (i.e don't defect with their equipment). Military bases are the most secure, but they don't have magical ordnance/fuel/parts generators that give them an endless supply of, supplies. Those have to be piped, trucked, and railed into the bases, and whos going to secure those vital supplies in transit? US Military installations are designed to withstand prolonged seige, not to operate under seige, and not with a diminished military, and not surrounded by armed countrymen. You're talking about a logistical fantasy.

Re-arm/reload operations in the field are time consuming, stressful, and take a disproportionate amount of manpower. You're looking at, for the subset of soldiers willing to fire on their countrymen, a 24/7 hostile ops cycle with no real place for R+R, no real hope of backfill for wounded/killed soliders, no long term solution for replenishment, constant worry for the safety of their own families (from their fellow soliders willing to fire on civilians).

This is as close to hell as you're likely to see on earth, and again, that assumes the soldier who disobey the order to fire on Americans magically vanish form the equation instead of directly engaging the units that obey, that the 4- or 5 veterans to every one active soldier do not 'up-arm/armor' themselves from battlefield pickups and "only" use their ar-15s and homeade ordnance, or that a foreign nation with an axe to grind doesn't sense an opportunity to strike us.

Its simply not a rational or realistic outcome. Thats why the 2nd amendment works. The mere superposition of an armed populace is what stops any idea about turning on the population in it's tracks. Its the civilian equivilant of MAD (mutual assured destruction) that kept cold war USA and USSR and their allies at bay.

And again Max ignores the fact that veterans outnumber the standing military by about a factor of 4 to 5. Explain to me again why you think that the population has zero experience fighting? Do you really think that all of the soldiers who have been fighting in the sandbox from Desert Storm to present day are ALL still in uniform? What do you suppose those veterans are going to do if the shooting starts?

You're right, comparing an insurrection against foreign occupation and an insurrection against a domestic government is a bad comparison, because in the former the government isn't fighting an existential battle for it's own legitimacy and survival, and therefore it won't be pulling literally all the stops, especially since this is apparently a super-evil Nazi Stalinist government that orders it's soldiers to just mow down unarmed civilians for no real particular reason. In that case, they'll probably just track down every able-bodied veteran and firearms owner with any significant armouries and blow them up with drones while patrolling the streets with robotic death squads, because hey, EVIL! If something like that happened, semi-automatic rifles and pistols would literally be worse then useless.

Meanwhile in real life, the government is not an evil comic book organization, and voting and lobbying is a million billion infinity times more effective then at controlling or curbing the power of government then a million saturday night specials or hunting rifles could ever possibly be.

I imagine the actual active army knows this too, which is probably why they wouldn't actually let people near an airfield during a time of war, even assuming that half the country rose up in a glorious revolution all over against (rather then the tiny and marginalized minority it would actually be).

You hit on several of the most important points implied by gun-ownership that I wish those who have been supporters of gun-ownership for decades would realize. It's not that people will always find a way or that only criminals will own guns, it's the freedom of the individual and not the state to wield power and the criminal notion that placing responsible, non-violent individuals in prison will somehow reduce incidents of violence.

Did you bother to even read the essay? There is little to no debate that political and judicial actions are far more effective and desirable alternatives to an armed rebellion when trying to repress tyranny. Violent revolution is the last resort and even then, it is only a single albeit large variable in a very complex equation.

The entire point is that freely surrendering your "last resort" would not only be asinine, but it might actually even invite tyranny.

As for a population with zero military experience, you must live either outside of America or in one of the "gun free" parts of the country to honestly believe that. There are millions of veterans here that take the Constitution VERY seriously, not to mention a large segment of our military that would never fire on their own friends and families.

Your assertion that our own government would be able to do to us what the French did to Bali is completely devoid of logic.

And what do you suppose the government would be fighting here in America with the killing of her own citizens and the wanton destruction of her own land? You think the public will have a taste for that?

I'd imagine you're assuming then that the military would either move all non-navel air power underground or out of country. The bulk of us airfields are very exposed, domestic sabotage has never been much of a concern. By "letting people get near an airfield" I assume you know that means not letting people be within about 2 miles to be sure none of the staged aircraft are within range of small arms fire, right? Aside from a few of the more secure desert airfields, thats impossible with displacing a good segment of the population. And that wouldn't affect the public perception, right?

Nice pivot! One straw man for another! How many do you have? I haven't seen anyone here try arguing the US military would morph into some comic book police state, but thanks for the hyperbole.

Voting and lobbying is a million times more effective, you're right about that. Have you noticed which direction gun control laws have been going for the past decade? Here's a hint, its not making the Brady campaign happy! The people have spoken via their state legislatures. They got expanded concealed carry and no extension of the 1994 assault weapons ban.

You're also trying very hard to miss, ignore, or redirect what the point of the 2nd amendment actually is there for... for the citizens to have small arms at or near parity of modern infantry.

Here's a why, because a majority of veterans remember the oath they swore to uphold the constitution and protect it from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Here's a when and a who, right now there are 22.7 million veterans as of 9/30/2010. There's about 1.5 million active and 1.5 million reserve forces right now.

Veterans tend to be firearms owners. Do you see the lopsided numbers game you're dealing with? What percentage do you think would arm up and fight if the government descended into Tyrany?

If you studied history, you'd see that in fact, individual liberty tends to suffer occasional setbacks, only to be won back and expand. Prohibition was repealed. Slavery was made illegal. Woman's suffrage became a constitutionally protected right. Segregation became illegal. To argue otherwise makes no sense, we as a society have more protected individual liberties now then we've had 200 years ago.

Except that you're not really brilliant enough to refute the 'guns=power' connection the author asserts. You come up with straw man argument after straw man argument that inevitably gets shot down in the light of real facts. You offer emotional arguments based on conjecture which read little more than "nuh-uh" or "i don't think so" with little to no factual merit.

Fact: the past few genocides have taken place after the population was stripped of their arms. Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot all followed the roadmap... take away their guns, then take away their rights, then take away their lives.

Fact: at no point does the article the author linked suggest that genocide will follow suit after civilian disarmament in America. It comes close, though, illustrating what HAS happened in America already (what has happened to the Native Americans in the course of our history was at the most charitable, a strong brush with genocide. The fact that we displaced Japanese and Italian citizens from cities to internment camps in WWII, while not genocide, does show how close we're willing to come to that as a people when push comes to shove).

Thats not exactly a slippery slope, but judging from your reaction to the article, it's clear you didn't bother to actually read it.

The point it DOES make is that an unarmed populace is a lot easier to control, and it makes that point again and again.

Thanks for making these very important points that the author omitted in his otherwise great piece on the subject. These inalienable rights do not come from government (no matter how many politicians may think they do) they come from God and are as you stated natural rights. And yes, we must remain vigilant, always. It's a people's duty to protect their rights.

I'm not someone who would consider myself on the "left" and most of you that are would consider me pretty far on the "right" (Texas RNC delegate pledged to Ron Paul, if that simplifies it) and I have to agree with Matt, "this is the best-articulated and most honest discussion of gun rights in the United States I've ever read." Thank you for spending the time and effort to put this together. I will be sharing this page widely, and for a very long time to come.

It's a shame that most of those leading the charge for more gun control will dismiss this piece outright. I do want to thank the author for putting this piece together. As a Black Man in America, I am a firm believer in the 2nd Amendment, yet, a great number of Blacks blindly follow the rhetoric of our so called 'leaders' (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, etc) that toe the line of the liberal white establishment. I always like to point out that if one looks at a map of the US, where you find the most stringent gun laws, are also where the highest concentrations of African-Americans reside. The 'Black Codes' are alive and well.

Thank God someone finally brought up the "state of mind" issue that is the central cause of these horrific mass shootings. Like the author said, it's not about pistol grips and magazine capacity, it's about what is making these people desire to kill as many innocent people as they can. We need to figure that out, not spend all our time and energy tearing our country apart into anti-gun and pro-gun sides.

Although I no longer have fire arms of any sort in my home, I believe this writer, an avowed "leftist," (whatever the hell that is), hits home. Having studied both Gandhi and MLK, Jr., you can be sure had the former had access to WMD to use against the British "overlords," he would have; if nothing, Gandhi was a pragmatist and understood the British schadenfreude better than most. Non-violence in the face of a culture such as that of England had great potential for working because of the moral consciousness of the average British citizen. The same thing is apropos of MLK, Jr., and the US of the Post WWII (WWI, Part B) era. The culture has a moral conscience and it would not be denied. We could engage in a long discussion of the validity of this, with someone, no doubt, bringing up the Germany of the post-WWi (Part A) era and why the citizenry not so clearly bought into what was taking place (Auschwitz, Buchenwald, et al.). Check the facts, the groups which were denied ownership of guns in that period were of a very specific type. Can we say ghettoized here? The point is, the 2nd Amendment should not be expurgated from the Constitution; changed, perhaps. But this outcry by those on the FAR RIGHT and within the corporate sponsored NRA (I was once a member, never more!) which affirms their belief the "Gubmint" is intent on taking their guns away is a pile of hot, steaming horse manure. The saving grace is those who use the "Bushmaster" and other such weapons do not have the technical expertise to turn them into the automatic weapons they could be; and thank god for that! Blame that on the education system which was rid of vocational education classes as everyone became enamored of all students attending college. I can guarantee this, my brother, a gifted mechanical genius, given time could turn a Bushmaster or these model AK-47s into full auto weapons. And wouldn't we have a good time then. Bottom line: Extended ammunition magazines, extended clips, "assault-like weapons," why would a civil society need them? And consider this: Given the distance US military technology has come in the 32 years since I retired from the AF, do you honest to God believe people armed with hunting rifles and handguns pose a real threat to the government of the people, by the people and for the people? (Thanks Lincoln). NOT! Orwell's "1984" arrived a very long time ago folks. Suggest you watch the show "Revolution" for fictional take on what could happen if our most important resources, electricity and technology, were taken from us. And don't go to London if you have crime on your mind; every street has camera surveillance (Watch a PBS show "MI-5"). Persuade you Congresspeople to protect our right to have arms, but also persuade them to institute the proper controls of these military style weapons, magazines and clips. No, I don't need any guns anymore!

Afghanistan not so simple as you make it out. Was there at the beginning; long retired from AF by the time the Soviets ignominiously left. Spoke with an old friend from those days just recently and his first remark to me was how correct I was in my analysis of what was likely to occur. And as for the region since, I have not yet been proven wrong as he also noted. Important here was the need to understand two things (actually, 3, more below): First: History (See Alexander the Great, Genghiz Khan, various other invaders, the British in the 19th century, etc.); Second: Culture including tribe, clan, family and agnate and all those connections). The 3rd and more important detail was technology was doomed to fail there. Not so much in the neighboring war between Iran and Iraq. Again, we come full circle to culture. As for our effort, in the world of politics (a nebulous subject at the best of times), when discussing "winning a war," the first thing to be done is to define what we mean by "winning." Here's a hint: morality, economic gains and losses, policy choices, political outcomes, and some other aspects of the human proclivity and need for comity must be weighed.

What you wrote, Polemicist, is pretty reasonable, but many of your commenters seem to think your article boils down to:1. What Liberals REALLY think is not what they say.2. We need guns because of Tyranny and Freeedom.3. Gun laws won't make us 100% safe, so why have any at all?

You admit that #2 and 3 are not valid arguments. Regarding #2, The U.S. is a representative democracy and is in no danger of becoming a dictatorship. The most undemocratic institution we have, a powerful political party, represents only 45-47% of our citizens, but has managed to retain control of over 55% of the House of Representatives through gerrymandering (by their own admission). They are advocating for your position, so I doubt that you want to protect yourself from them, even though they wrote and passed the most anti-democratic laws of our times, the Orwellianly-named Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (warrantless wiretaps). Regarding #3, DUI and car safety laws do not eliminate all vehicular deaths, but no one sane is arguing for eliminating all automobile registrations and laws. Why should we consider anyone as a reasonable human being who argues the same for gun safety and sales? If Wayne LaPierre were making his arguments about car safety belt laws, then he would be called delusional and dangerous. Why are we taking the NRA seriously instead seeing them as a gun manufacturer paid lobbying group?

So, Polemicist, why do you still propagate lie #1. It's nonsense. Other patriotic Americans who happen to be liberal are telling you what we think. It is not gun confiscation or making guns illegal- just common sense gun regulations. Why are you accusing us of lying? Stop it, you're being insulting. (Besides, if you really had a method to read minds, there are millions of husbands out there ready and willing to make you very rich. You do not. Quit pretending you read minds.)

Don't lump all veterans together. We're not all right wing nut jobs with guns. The biggest anti-democratic group I see in America today consists of those people screaming "Tyranny" and advocating the violent overthrow of a democratically elected government, just because they're not getting it all their own way. The NRA and the GOP/Tea Party (the people who passed the Patriot Act and FISA) scare me more than the executive branch of the federal government. Yes, I do remember my oath. Just don't assume we'd be on the same side.

Steve, the only issue I have with you is your use of the term political right, I am not sure if it's a liberal thing, the amendments to the constitution are not political rights, they are unalienable rights. The term political right's are derived by political means and are subject to the ebb and flow of politics both right and left. Unalienable rights are not. bed rock constitutional principle

In the essay, I pointed out some of the politicians who have SAID that they would be OK with confiscation. I also see this on innumerable comments and hear it in innumerable conversations. Many self-identified liberal gun-control advocates freely admit, that, though they're not pushing for it right now, they wouldn't mind confiscation of all guns at all, because they really do consider the right own guns to be important right at all. I don't think it's insulting anyone to point this out.

If you're addressing me (my name's not Steve) I'll just say that the word "political" has a strong meaning for me. I think all "rights" only have meaning in a political community, are really produced by the way a community structures itself. I think that, historically, national communities (and even the international community) have come to identify certain rights as having so much value as to be irrevocable and "inalienable" -- to be treated as if they were outside of history. That's a good thing, and for all of those rights so identified that I know of, we should stick to it. But (pardon this analogy), kind of like forever in the marriage contract, it's not strictly speaking true.

I've had a lot of readers for this post,(over 26,000 to date) and a lot of comments, and I cannot respond to many of them. It's been very gratifying to me that they have been overwhelmingly positive, both from those who identify themselves as left or liberal, and those who identify themselves as on the right.

For the former, I hope you will pass this on to your like-minded friends. I think it's important that we try to stop what's already a runaway erosion of fundamental rights in the name of security, and that more well-meaning folks see how this issue fits in that picture. We need to think outside the conventional liberal box!

For the latter, I am grateful that so many of you read this long post thoroughly, debated it carefully and in fine detail, and saw that it was a left discourse that is seriously different from what's usually called liberalism in America, one that has some attitudes and positions you could agree with. I hope you'll read some other posts of mine, and weigh them in your mind as carefully.

A great piece. My only cavil is that where you use "liberal," I'd change it to "progressive." Gun rights and the Second Amendment are issues that highlight the difference between liberals and progressives, imo. Liberalism was created in opposition to the absolutist regimes of Old Europe, and founded on the ideals of popular sovereignty and immanent rights.

Bless the FSM for you and this amazing post! I fear that it's wisdom, wit and cool-headed reason will fall upon the deaf ears and blind eyes of a culture that declares anything longer than a 140-character tweet TL:DR, but bless you nonetheless. You have restored my faith in the left, which I have long known was the only political faction with a genuine interest in people.

Right on. Starting to see more and more of this thankfully. Just checked out an article by a guy named Brendan O'Neill in the Telegraph ("Traditionally, racists and reactionaries demanded gun control in America. Why have Leftists now joined in?") and a short book on Amazon by a guy named Nhial Esso ("The Left Wing in Defense of the Right to Bear Arms") with similar arguments. You can find both with a quick Google search.

I am so delighted to have found this. I read many articles on this issue and it seems that the left perspective is able to nail it down in the most articulate and thorough manner. Another leftist gun rights argument comes from Kontradictions (it's worth a google!) and again, the few blogs disseminated by him are very well-researched and laid out (he DESTROYS assault weapons ban arguments in one blog entry).

However, this essay takes the cake. Kudos to the author and I have already shared your writings. My only lament is that I have just now found this gem since, while being somewhat conservative with libertarian streaks, I routinely supply my liberal friends with evidence that gun rights being strictly a conservative or right-wing value stems from the false dichotomy that is our broken political system.

I think I will take your advice on this. My blurring of the two (left and liberal) stems not from ignorance but rather laziness I suppose. I've let MSM and such tell me they are essentially one in the same. Time to educate myself as I welcome the idea of having allies from another system of thought!

Also, one thing I would recommend: Maybe read up a little on the trade offs between full auto and semi auto. Full auto capability is not some serious game changer. Having a gun with the "oh shit switch" is better than one without but I'd say it is more of a tool for a certain kind of job.

I've had a lot of positive response to this article from folks who are attracted to libertarian social principles, who would not normally identify with a left discourse, and who may have been surprised that someone who does identify as a leftist takes such a position. This left-socialist thinks those folks might be interested to know that there are other strains of anarcho-libertarian thought out there.

“As surprising as it might seem, there’s a strong parallel between this free market vision of abundance and the Marxist vision of full communism. Commons-based peer production is the core around which the post-capitalist economy will eventually crystallize. . . .”

Blah,Blah, Blah, Blah Blah.......Your argument is not without merit, but certainly is not lacking of words. For Christ sake, we are impressed with your Bombastic command of the keyboard, but get to the point,Man! You won't sway anyone who is asleep..........ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

I'm going to be linking this everywhere I can and encouraging folks to read it. As a liberal gun owner, I've spent a lot of time thinking, writing, and talking about this subject. You tie it all together in a cogent, reasonable, and honest way that is very powerful.

Thank you so much for posting this. I do not believe I have ever seen an argument so eloquently spoken and well researched. Virtually every hypocrisy and injustice I see on the part of the "gun-control" advocates has been highlighted and addressed in a frank and succinct manner. I especially appreciate the balanced opinion you have given on the issue of regulations, since it is simply idiotic to say that one can be endowed with a right without corresponding responsibility.I thank you, because I believe you may just have delivered to me what an invaluable resource in my quest to develop a metaphorical "atom-bomb" in the battle to counter-act the needlessly draconian and indubitably ineffective firearm restrictions we have here in Australia.Once again, I thank you for writing this, you have my undying respect and admiration.

You can bet your gods-damned bippy I'm gonna share this as much as possible!Thank you so much for posting this. I do not believe I have ever seen an argument so eloquently spoken and well researched. Virtually every hypocrisy and injustice I see on the part of the "gun-control" advocates has been highlighted and addressed in a frank and succinct manner. I especially appreciate the balanced opinion you have given on the issue of regulations, since it is simply idiotic to say that one can be endowed with a right without corresponding responsibility.I thank you, because I believe you may just have delivered to me what an invaluable resource in my quest to develop a metaphorical "atom-bomb" in the battle to counter-act the needlessly draconian and indubitably ineffective firearm restrictions we have here in Australia.Once again, I thank you for writing this, you have my undying respect and admiration.

And would that you had listened to the Southerners and their "Black Codes"! American hasn't a "gun Problem" but a "gun in the hands of negros Problem". As the Washington Post said when looking at crime in New York City:

"In short, 95.1 percent of all murder victims and 95.9 percent of all shooting victims in New York City are black or Hispanic. And 90.2 percent of those arrested for murder and 96.7 percent of those arrested for shooting someone are black and Hispanic. I don't even know where to begin to describe the horror I still feel looking at those numbers. But the word 'hunted' comes to mind."

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/11/post_9.html

As Whites are hunted and killed daily now on the streets of America in what the attackers call, "Polar Bear Hunting" or "Beat Whitey Night" or "Knock Out King" game where whites are left with shattered faces and brains damaged or merely blinded, you can pat yourself on the back about those Southerners who warned you about the Savages you unleashed and how Stupid they were. While Detroit, in a scene right out of Mad Max, can't even keep its street lights on or its electricity going in a city that is 95% black, as every night houses are set on fire light up the night but the city services refuse to go out to put them out for fear of "sniper fire", Northerners can feel good about themselves as they import Somalians who rape and rob in Wisconsin, a State where such crimes were unknown. Enjoy your enrichment, savor that Diversity. You earned it through your thinking that a savage people who never even invented the Wheel could step from the Jungle to Advanced Culture. The toll from your ignorance fills every Emergency Room in this Country. Look up the "Knoxville Horror", Autumn Pasquale, Jonathan Foster on Christmas Eve and thousands of others in What the Australians call "The Dirty War". That is your Legacy. That is always the Legacy of "Diversity".

Regarding the previous comment by "Lt_Greyman_NVA": I have not been moderating comments. I am loathe to refuse or delete a comment, unless it is personally insulting or entirely irrelevant. I'm happy to say that I've had scores of comments on this post by many people on the right and left, and none have approached the outrageous racism (as well as substantive irrelevance) so proudly displayed in this comment. I would not want my page to become a bulletin board for such discourse, but I think it's best to let this stand. It speaks for itself.

Loved it. While I'd say I'm more liberal than I am revolutionary radical it resonated very deeply with how I think. One thing I do take issue with though is the "fire in a crowded theatre" analogy. It comes from a judgement used to imprison anti-war activists in a way we should not valorise.

I read your article and you are obviously very passionate about your topic. I give you no bonus points for going on way to long.

So I ask you, what I ask everyone that spouts this stuff, what is your plan?If you have no plan then your plan is to continue to accept one mass or multiple shooting a week from here on I guess until someone you know or love is hurt by one?

Let me add I own a gun and fully support the 2nd amendment but not as you or the NRA see it. I say as do most (if not all) that I don't want my neighbor to have a tank or an atomic bomb which one might argue would be needed to "stand up to the government". So how about we find some common ground and not stick to silly phrases. If you can't have an atom bomb, where is the line?

I consider this article excellent. I will probably end up quoting it somewhere along the way. Keep up the good writing. The part where you say that the Liberals must be honest and simply seek, remove, delete, or cripple the Second Amendment is something I've been saying for a year or two. I couldn't agree more.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts so eloquently. I would like to point out that, in my opinion, you have badly misrepresented Orwell by missing his preceding sentences in your opening quote. They were:

"Even as it stands the Home Guard could only exist in a country where men feel themselves free. The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do, they cannot give the factory worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see it stays there.”

The article this is from was written in 1941 at a time when right wing, conservative Americans had successfully kept the US from fighting fascism; France and the rest of Western Europe had been conquered by the Nazis; the Soviet Union had a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany and Orwell's Britain stood alone and isolated, and was under imminent and very real threat of invasion by the most terrifying totalitarian regime in history. The Home Guard he was talking about was a part of the British Army (composed of men excluded usually on age or occupation grounds from the regular army) that had responsibility for fighting the Nazis if they invaded the country. Orwell's point was that the members of this (WELL REGULATED GOVERNMENT MILITIA) could take their weapons home with them and would not use them in a revolution against the government because the government was democratic (as opposed to totalitarian).

I am afraid that your implication that Orwell was a supporter of an indiscriminately armed populace (with the inevitable and very well documented tragic consequences) is disingenuous to say the least.

What he said.

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About The Polemicist

This blog is the work of one person, a New York City native and denizen, who came of age politically in the 60s, and has been a taxi driver, college professor, and political consultant. The aim is to be intellectually rigorous, politically challenging, and occasionally snarky, from a left-socialist perspective.